Broadcom Bluetooth [0a5c:216a] does not work on 14.04.2

[Po-Hsu Lin]

CID: 201411-16163 Dell Inspiron 3551

The Bluetooth device (0a5c:216a) on this laptop does not work on 14.04.2, it can't find any other Bluetooth devices at all (simliar to bug 1129865).

In dmesg output, you can see that it failed to load the firmware:

ubuntu@201411-16163:~$ dmesg | grep -i bluetooth
[ 16.262873] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.19
[ 16.262907] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[ 16.262916] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[ 16.262920] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[ 16.262946] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[ 16.315946] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
[ 16.315961] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
[ 16.315970] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11
[ 16.416558] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[ 16.416563] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast
[ 16.416573] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized
[ 21.487947] bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
[ 21.487955] bluetooth hci0: Falling back to user helper
[ 21.489402] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: patch brcm/BCM43142A0-0a5c-216a.hcd not found
[ 23.495078] Bluetooth: hci0 command 0x1003 tx timeout

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: linux-image-3.16.0-33-generic 3.16.0-33.44~14.04.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.16.0-33.44~14.04.1-generic 3.16.7-ckt7
Uname: Linux 3.16.0-33-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.7
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Tue Mar 24 02:32:11 2015
InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-03-23 (0 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20150218.1)
SourcePackage: linux-lts-utopic
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Po-Hsu Lin (cypressyew)]

Also affect 201406-15257 Dell Inspiron 7347
With the same Bluetooth device.

[Pilot6 (hanipouspilot)]

Firmware is needed for this device. To get this firmware Windows driver is needed.
If someone has Windows, then you can find there an inf file which indicates which firmware file is needed and then get this firmware file.
After that it can be converted to hcd and used in Linux.

[Jesse Sung (wenchien)]

The firmware is the missing part to support this device in kernel 3.16.

Unless we can get BCM43142A0-0a5c-216a.hcd from Broadcom, what we can do now is just like what @Pilot6 said in the previous comment. If anyone wants to convert an hex file to an hcd one, here's how:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1065400/comments/11
And note that please use BCM43142A0-0a5c-216a.hcd instead of fw-<vid>_<uid>.hcd, and copy the file to /lib/firmware/brcm/ instead.

[Pilot6 (hanipouspilot)]

I wrote a manual how to install the firmware.

http://askubuntu.com/a/632348/167850

[Yung Shen (kaxing)]

Thank you Pilot6.
As mentioned in comment #6, the firmware works fine on a system(14.04.3, 3.19) with [0a5c:216a].

An additional note, once the system applied with .hcd firmware even you remove it later it will still working(reboot, suspend.. etc) until the next cold boot.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Po-Hsu Lin/Jesse Sung, is there an ongoing discussion between the Ubuntu Community and Broadcom about providing the necessary firmware?