Chrome OS qualified as a Host Subsystem for Bluetooth 4.0 + Low Energy

A message to the BlueZ mailing list from Scott James Remnant from Google announced that Chrome OS with BlueZ 5.x has successfully passed Bluetooth 4.0 + Low Energy qualification.

Congrats to Scott and the Chrome OS team. Nicely done.

Release of sbc-1.2

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

Release of BlueZ 5.14

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

Release of BlueZ 5.13

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

Release of BlueZ 5.12

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

Release of BlueZ 5.11

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

Release of BlueZ 5.10

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

Android related work happening in BlueZ

To avoid unnecessary questions and confusion I thought it’d be good to give a quick overview of Android related code that will be going into bluez.git in the near future.

Since Android 4.2 there exists a well standardized HAL interface that the Bluetooth stack is expected to provide and which enables the easy replacement of the stack of choice on Android. What’s now happening in BlueZ is that we’re working on making BlueZ a drop-in replacement to Android by ensuring that the required HAL interfaces are available straight out of the BlueZ source tree.

Most of the work has little or  no impact on existing BlueZ functionality and architecture and the code will be going under a separate “android” subdirectory. However, since we’re trying to reuse as much code with the rest of BlueZ as possible this also means that some refactoring will be happening elsewhere in the tree to create reusable library-like modules from parts of the code.

One of the intentions of this work is to avoid multiple companies doing their own Android adaptation for BlueZ by having the work done in a central place upstream.