Bluetooth Low Energy hardware issue on 15.0
by chris.willing from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6DSYH)
Just some info that might save others some time ...
I've been developing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) related code on some ESP32 MCU development boards to have them act as BLE peripherals. They are detected OK by my phone but my development machine running Slackware64 15.0 is unable to detect them (for instance, using the blueman-manager app.). I thought maybe the builtin hardware might be too old but it is supposedly BLE capable (Intel Corp. AX200 Bluetooth).
After hours of googling, trying various code snippets and coming up empty, I tried two laptops which happen to be running -current, one with Intel AX201 hardware and the other with AX210. Both were able to detect my little ESP32 boards as expected. During my earlier googling, I had come across some posts implicating kernel version problems in the 5.15 series and although these were much earlier than the 5.15.118 we have in 15.0, I was nevertheless keen to try a kernel from -current in my 15.0 machine.
Before changing to the -current kernel, I noticed that there was some difference in kernel-firmware versions between 15.0 and -current (20230725 vs 20230809) so I tried upgrading to the firmware from -current. I figured that if this caused some breakage, it would be easier to revert just the kernel-firmware package than fiddling around with different kernel & module packages.
Anyway, upgrading the kernel-firmware made all the difference. Blueman-manager now detects all my BLE devices and I've seen no other bad side effects yet.
Conclusion: problems using BLE with Intel AX2?? hardware (perhaps also others) are likely to be fixed by updating to the newer kernel-firmware available in -current.
chris
I've been developing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) related code on some ESP32 MCU development boards to have them act as BLE peripherals. They are detected OK by my phone but my development machine running Slackware64 15.0 is unable to detect them (for instance, using the blueman-manager app.). I thought maybe the builtin hardware might be too old but it is supposedly BLE capable (Intel Corp. AX200 Bluetooth).
After hours of googling, trying various code snippets and coming up empty, I tried two laptops which happen to be running -current, one with Intel AX201 hardware and the other with AX210. Both were able to detect my little ESP32 boards as expected. During my earlier googling, I had come across some posts implicating kernel version problems in the 5.15 series and although these were much earlier than the 5.15.118 we have in 15.0, I was nevertheless keen to try a kernel from -current in my 15.0 machine.
Before changing to the -current kernel, I noticed that there was some difference in kernel-firmware versions between 15.0 and -current (20230725 vs 20230809) so I tried upgrading to the firmware from -current. I figured that if this caused some breakage, it would be easier to revert just the kernel-firmware package than fiddling around with different kernel & module packages.
Anyway, upgrading the kernel-firmware made all the difference. Blueman-manager now detects all my BLE devices and I've seen no other bad side effects yet.
Conclusion: problems using BLE with Intel AX2?? hardware (perhaps also others) are likely to be fixed by updating to the newer kernel-firmware available in -current.
chris