Bluetooth Firmware MAC Address Issue

[lsgunth]

While upgrading from Jessie to Stretch, I found the latest Bluetooth firmware has a weird issue with the MAC Address it initializes the bluetooth adapter with.

With bluez-firmware version 1.2-3+rpi2, the mac address is set to 43:43:A1:12:1F:AC. This may be constant across hardware seeing I've found reference to it on the internet [1]. Besides that, this weird MAC address breaks bluetooth PAN because the bnep adapter gets rejected as a valid device when adding it to bridge. This is because the mac address is actually a multicast address (bit 1 is set in the first octet) and thus fails the 'is_valid_ether_addr' check in the kernel.

With bluez-firmware version 1.2-3+rpi1, the mac address is what it was originally (with a proper B8:27:EB: prefix). However, this version of the firmware doesn't seem to work correctly with the rest of the bluetooth stack in Stretch.

Thanks,

Logan

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=148305&start=100

[asavah]

I can confim this too.
And I have exactly the same BT MAC as you do

hciconfig -a
hci0:   Type: Primary  Bus: UART
        BD Address: 43:43:A1:12:1F:AC  ACL MTU: 1021:8  SCO MTU: 64:1
        UP RUNNING PSCAN
        RX bytes:822 acl:0 sco:0 events:57 errors:0
        TX bytes:3982 acl:0 sco:0 commands:57 errors:0
        Features: 0xbf 0xfe 0xcf 0xfe 0xdb 0xff 0x7b 0x87
        Packet type: DM1 DM3 DM5 DH1 DH3 DH5 HV1 HV2 HV3
        Link policy: RSWITCH SNIFF
        Link mode: SLAVE ACCEPT
        Name: 'rpi3'
        Class: 0x1c0000
        Service Classes: Rendering, Capturing, Object Transfer
        Device Class: Miscellaneous,
        HCI Version: 4.1 (0x7)  Revision: 0x145
        LMP Version: 4.1 (0x7)  Subversion: 0x2209
        Manufacturer: Broadcom Corporation (15)

[pelwell]

The new Bluetooth firmware seems to be ignoring the MAC address programmed into its OTP- the address you have now is a default for that chip (4343 A1 ...). Fortunately there is a way to set a MAC address using hciattach. Here is a modified version of the /usr/bin/btuart script that should set the MAC address correctly.

If you want to try it, download it to the home directory of user pi and:

sudo mv /usr/bin/btuart{,.orig}
sudo cp ~pi/btuart /usr/bin/btuart
sudo reboot

To return to the shipping version, which I recommend before updating the pi-bluetooth package, run:

sudo mv /usr/bin/btuart{.orig,}

[asavah]

Thx, modified btuart indeed works as expected here, bt mac now is the good one.

[lsgunth]

Cool, thanks. This workaround solves my problems too.