BlueZ

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

This release contains numerous fixes in many places of the stack, including SDP, AVRCP and OBEX. The btmon HCI analyzer tool also received updates to fully encode a few missing HCI commands.

This is also the first release where have some basic parts of the Android Bluetooth HAL implemented. Things like GAP (device discovery, pairing, etc) should work as well as connecting and using HID devices. All of the Android code lives independently in the android subdirectory of the source tree, though it does share several parts of the “normal” BlueZ source code, such as the SDP handling and mgmt library.

bluez-5.11.tar.xz

This release contains various bug fixes identified and fixed at the latest UnplugFest. The main profiles concerned are AVRCP and MAP. Other notable changes include more comprehensive protocol decoders in the btmon tool as well as a nice interactive command line client for OBEX (obexctl).

bluez-5.10.tar.xz

This release comes with all sorts of fixes and updates to OBEX related profiles. There is also more complete HCI decoding support in btmon as well as some improvements to our user space HCI emulator code. One notable, though completely backwards compatible, API change is the removal of the Profile1.Cancel method. This was mainly used for canceling a NewConnection call that took too long, however bluetoothd always called shutdown on the socket in this case which made the D-Bus call redundant. From BlueZ 5.9 onwards this method is no longer called and previous (5.x) BlueZ versions handle its absence gracefully.

One notable build related change in 5.9 is the removal of the libusb dependency. USB support in BlueZ is now fully self-contained and packages can drop any libusb dependency they might have had.

bluez-5.9.tar.xz