BlueZ

This is mostly a bug fix release with issues fixed regarding LE single mode device detection and incorrect getpeername() calls which could have caused incorrect SDP records for profiles (mainly those using the Profile D-Bus interface with RFCOMM channel auto-allocation).

On the OBEX side we now have full OBEX authentication support, which is a fairly useless feature in practice but a mandatory one for qualification of some OBEX profiles. On the Android side the major feature addition this time is LE GATT client support.

bluez-5.18.tar.xz

This is mostly a bug fix release with issues fixed in OBEX, dual-mode device pairing, and LE related areas.

On the Android side a major new feature is Handsfree Profile 1.6 support, including Wideband Speech capability.

bluez-5.17.tar.xz

Here’s 5.16. For the most part it’s a bug fix release with a couple of regressions fixed regarding the “Paired” property that had crept into 5.15. People using 5.15 are strongly recommended to upgrade because of these fixes. There is also a fix for HID over GATT (LE) device creation.

As far as new non-Android features are concerned this release supports the New Signature Resolving Key mgmt event which will make its debut in the 3.15 kernel release.

On the Android side by far the biggest feature addition is full support for A2DP 1.3 and AVRCP 1.5. Several other profiles, such as HFP and GATT have continued receiving a fair amount of patches as well, but they are not considered complete yet.

bluez-5.16.tar.xz

This release contains bug fixes in various areas, including LE background scanning when LE is enabled after powering on, setting proper attributes for HID over GATT input devices and storing of LE Long Term Keys for slave role operation.

Besides the fixes a notable feature addition is the support for LE Identity Resolving Keys which enable the resolving of devices with Resolvable Private Addresses (one prominent example of such devices are all iOS based ones). This feature requires a kernel with Privacy support enabled and the patches for it are right now being targeted for the 3.15 kernel release. For people wanting to experiment already now the bluetooth-next tree can be used.

On the Android side the rate of new patches keeps going strong and is still accounting for over half of the patches since the previous release. The most important area that has made significant progress is audio where basic A2DP support is now starting to be in place.

bluez-5.15.tar.xz

With this release the SBC library now allows to enable a high precision encoding and also support special setup functions to initialize the encoder and decoder for A2DP streams.

sbc-1.2.tar.gz

As far as user visible features are concerned the biggest highlight of this release is the improved/fixed support for PS3 remote controls as well as the added support for PS4 remote controls (DualShock 4). Besides this we’ve got various fixes here and there, much more Android functionality as well as more complete automated test tools (bringing among other things fairly complete pairing tests).

bluez-5.14.tar.xz

This release consists mostly of further features added to the various Android HALs (Core, Socket, PAN and HID), but a few non-Android changes have crept in too:

• Fix issue with PS3 controller detection
• HCI event decoding improvements to btmon

bluez-5.13.tar.xz

This is mostly a bug-fix release, but also contains several notable additions:

• PS3 (sixaxis) controller support
• smp-tester for LE Security Manager Protocol testing
• AVDTP qualification test cases (unit/test-avdtp)
• LE Connection Oriented Channel test support with l2test (LE CoC is a feature of the newly released Bluetooth 4.1 specification)
• btmon decoding support for LE CoC signaling commands, CSA4 and Core spec 4.1 HCI commands

As with the previous release, simply from a statistical perspective the majority of the changes are on the still work-in-progress Android support side (android/* in the source tree), where we should now have mostly working core, PAN and HID HALs, as well as the socket HAL which enables several higher level profiles like OPP and PBAP.

bluez-5.12.tar.xz