Re: [PATCH] Bluetooth: qca: fix device-address endianness

[Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2024 at 04:50:59PM +0000, Matthias Kaehlcke wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 27, 2023 at 07:03:06PM +0100, Johan Hovold wrote:
> > The WCN6855 firmware on the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s expects the Bluetooth
> > device address in MSB order when setting it using the
> > EDL_WRITE_BD_ADDR_OPCODE command.
> > 
> > Presumably, this is the case for all non-ROME devices which all use the
> > EDL_WRITE_BD_ADDR_OPCODE command for this (unlike the ROME devices which
> > use a different command and expect the address in LSB order).
> > 
> > Reverse the little-endian address before setting it to make sure that
> > the address can be configured using tools like btmgmt or using the
> > 'local-bd-address' devicetree property.
> > 
> > Note that this can potentially break systems with boot firmware which
> > has started relying on the broken behaviour and is incorrectly passing
> > the address via devicetree in MSB order.
> 
> We should not break existing devices. Their byte order for
> 'local-bd-address' may not adhere to the 'spec', however in practice
> it is the correct format for existing kernels.

That depends on in what way the current devices are broken.

Any machines that correctly specify their address in little-endian order
in the devicetree would no longer be configured using the wrong address.
So no problem there (except requiring users to re-pair their gadgets).

And tools like btgmt is broken on all of these Qualcomm machine in any
case and would now start working as expected. So no problem there either
(unless user space had adapted an inverted the addresses to btmgmt).

So the first question is whether there actually is any boot firmware out
there which passes the BD_ADDR in reverse order?

> I suggest adding a quirk like 'local-bd-address-msb-quirk' or
> 'qcom,local-bd-address-msb-quirk' to make sure existing devices keep
> working properly.

I don't think that would work. If this is something that we really need
to handle, then there's probably no way around introducing new
compatible strings for boot firmware that isn't broken while maintaining
the current broken behaviour with respect to 'local-bd-address' for some
of the current ones.

Johan