More Bluetooth (and gaming) features

In the midst of post-release bug fixing, we've also added a fair number of new features to our stack. As usual, new features span a number of different components, so integrators will have to be careful picking up all the components when, well, integrating.

PS3 clones joypads support

Do you have a PlayStation 3 joypad that feels just a little bit "off"? You can't find the Sony logo anywhere on it? The figures on the face buttons look like barbed wire? And if it were a YouTube video, it would say "No copyright intended"?

Bingo. When plugged in via USB, those devices advertise themselves as SHANWAN or Gasia, and implement the bare minimum to work when plugged into a PlayStation 3 console. But as a Linux computer would behave slightly differently, we need to fix a couple of things.

The first fix was simple, but necessary to be able to do any work: disable the rumble motor that starts as soon as you plug the pad through USB.

Once that's done, we could work around the fact that the device isn't Bluetooth compliant, and hard-code the HID service it's supposed to offer.

Bluetooth LE Battery reporting

Bluetooth Low Energy is the new-fangled (7-year old) protocol for low throughput devices, from a single coin-cell powered sensor, to input devices. What's great is that there's finally a standardised way for devices to export their battery statuses. I've added support for this in BlueZ, which UPower then picks up for desktop integration goodness.

There are a number of Bluetooth LE joypads available for pickup, including a few that should be firmware upgradeable. Look for "Bluetooth 4" as well as "Bluetooth LE" when doing your holiday shopping.

gnome-bluetooth work

Finally, this is the boring part. Benjamin and I reworked code that's internal to gnome-bluetooth, as used in the Settings panel as well as the Shell, to make it use modern facilities like GDBusObjectManager. The overall effect of this is, less code, less brittle and more reactive when Bluetooth adapters come and go, such as when using airplane mode.

Apart from the kernel patch mentioned above (you'll know if you need it :), those features have been integrated in UPower 0.99.7 and in the upcoming BlueZ 5.48. And they will of course be available in Fedora, both in rawhide and as updates to Fedora 27 as soon as the releases have been done and built.

GG!

Bluetooth on Fedora: joypads and (more) security

It's been a while since I posted about Fedora specific Bluetooth enhancements, and even longer that I posted about PlayStation controllers support.

Let's start with the nice feature.

Dual-Shock 3 and 4 support

We've had support for Dual-Shock 3 (aka Sixaxis, aka PlayStation 3 controllers) for a long while, but I've added a long-standing patchset to the Fedora packages that changes the way devices are setup.

The old way was: plug in your joypad via USB, disconnect it, and press the "P" button on the pad. At this point, and since GNOME 3.12, you would have needed the Bluetooth Settings panel opened for a question to pop up about whether the joypad can connect.

This is broken in a number of ways. If you were trying to just charge the joypad, then it would forget its original "console" and you would need to plug it in again. If you didn't have the Bluetooth panel opened when trying to use it wirelessly, then it just wouldn't have worked.

Set up is now simpler. Open the Bluetooth panel, plug in your device, and answer the question. You just want to charge it? Dismiss the query, or simply don't open the Bluetooth panel, it'll work dandily and won't overwrite the joypad's settings.

And finally, we also made sure that it works with PlayStation 4 controllers.

Note that the PlayStation 4 controller has a button combination that allows it to be visible and pairable, except that if the device trying to connect with it doesn't behave in a particular way (probably the same way the 25€ RRP USB adapter does), it just wouldn't work. And it didn't work for me on a number of different devices.

Cable pairing for the win!

And the boring stuff

Hey, do you know what happened last week? There was a security problem in a package that I glance at sideways sometimes! Yes. Again.

A good way to minimise the problems caused by problems like this one is to lock the program down. In much the same way that you'd want to restrict thumbnailers, or even end-user applications, we can forbid certain functionality from being available when launched via systemd.

We've finally done this in recent fprintd and iio-sensor-proxy upstream releases, as well as for bluez in Fedora Rawhide. If testing goes well, we will integrate this in Fedora 27.