hciattach on rpi4 times out on first attempt

[Paul Larson]

I've observed this in both armhf and arm64 on:
19.10.1-server
18.04.4-server
core18

It does not seem to happen on rpi3, only on rpi4.
If you want to use Bluetooth on rpi, one must first run:
$ sudo hciattach /dev/ttyAMA0 bcm43xx 921600 noflow

On RPI4, this results in a timeout on the first attempt. Reattempting it right after will work though, 100% of the times I've tried it.

In the failed attempt, the output is:
  bcm43xx_init
  Initialization timed out.

And the following is the only new message to show up in dmesg when this fails:
  [ 270.303691] uart-pl011 fe201000.serial: no DMA platform data

[Hui Wang (hui.wang)]

I tested raspbian on the RPI4B board, also could reproduce this problem.

steps of testing:
login the raspbian, sudo mv /usr/bin/hciattach /usr/bin/hciattach-bak
reboot
login, check the bluetooth is not up "hcitool dev"
run sudo hciattach-bak /dev/ttyAMA0 bcm43xx 921600 noflow
will timeout and fail
run sudo hciattach-bak /dev/ttyAMA0 bcm43xx 921600 noflow
it works..

And because raspbian installed pi-bluetooth package, this issue was not exposed.

[Hui Wang (hui.wang)]

I install the pi-bluetooth on ubuntu 19.10.1, after reboot, the bluetooth works automatically.

So pi-bluetooth could hide this issue.

[ 24.924485] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ hcitool dev
Devices:
        hci0 B8:27:EB:24:02:02

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1862831

[Juerg Haefliger (juergh)]

Hrm. So pi-bluetooth seems to do some setup magic that is required for bluetooth to come up properly on Raspberry Pis? So the fix is simply to install pi-bluetooth when one wants to use bluetooth?

[Francis Ginther (fginther)]

Should we just add pi-bluetooth to the image builds? Are there any downsides of this packaging being installed on non-pi4 models?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

The Eoan Ermine has reached end of life, so this bug will not be fixed for that release

[michel jacobs (0d0a)]

solution of hui wang works for me!
thx