Broadcom Bluetooth firmware for Linux kernel

Overview

This package intentended to provide firmware of Broadcom WIDCOMM® Bluetooth devices (including BCM20702, BCM20703, BCM43142 chipsets and other) for Linux kernel. Since February 2017, Broadcom ships their drivers directly to Windows Update service. They can be downloaded here.

Security considerations

Recently several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Bluetooth stack such as CVE-2018-5383, CVE-2019-9506 (KNOB), CVE-2020-10135 (BIAS) and more. Since Broadcom has stopped active support for its consumer devices, your system may be subject to security risks. You will have to use these devices at your own risk. As a repository maintainer, I cannot provide security fixes.

Installation

Check your Linux distribution repositories.

There are autogenerated DEB and RPM packages for RedHat and Debian based distributions.

Detection and manual installation

When you inserting Broadcom Bluetooth device you prefered Linux distribution may not load it properly.

You may list all Bluetooth devices like this:

dmesg | grep -i bluetooth # Shows all Bluetooth driver info
dmesg | grep -i bluetooth | grep -i firmware # Shows Bluetooth firmware issues

The output may look like this:

Bluetooth: hci1: BCM: chip id 63
Bluetooth: hci1: BCM20702A
Bluetooth: hci1: BCM20702A1 (001.002.014) build 0000
bluetooth hci1: Direct firmware load for brcm/BCM20702A1-0b05-17cb.hcd failed with error -2
Bluetooth: hci1: BCM: Patch brcm/BCM20702A1-0b05-17cb.hcd not found

As you can see, you need brcm/BCM20702A1-0b05-17cb.hcd firmware.

Place required .hcd file to /lib/firmware/brcm and reboot your computer. After reboot you will see that firmware successfully loaded:

Bluetooth: hci1: BCM: chip id 63
Bluetooth: hci1: BCM20702A
Bluetooth: hci1: BCM20702A1 (001.002.014) build 0000
Bluetooth: hci1: BCM20702A1 (001.002.014) build 1467
Bluetooth: hci1: Broadcom Bluetooth Device

Congratulations, now your bluetooth device successfully loaded. Now go to Bluez for futher configuration.

Incorrect names for devices

There may be incorrect naming between presented firmware name and name requested from Linux kernel. For example, system may request BCM4354A2-13d3-3485.hcd but actually this is BCM4356A2-13d3-3485.hcd. This is happens because incorrect naming in Linux kernel. Just rename file to name that need to kernel. Here quick naming convertion:

Notes about combined WiFi+Bluetooth devices

Some Bluetooth controller (for example, BCM4354 and BCM4356) are integrated to WiFi chipset (this can be BCM43XX 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter or just simple generic Broadcom PCIE Wireless). These devices requires two kinds of firmware - first for WiFi, and second for Bluetooth. Without WiFi firmware Bluetooth will not initialize and will not work properly. Firmware for WiFi already included to kernel, but you may need to do additional work to place correct NVRAM.

Here example how it can looks (note about brcm/brcmfmac4356-pcie.txt loading - this is your customized NVRAM):

usbcore: registered new interface driver brcmfmac
brcmfmac 0000:02:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware brcm/brcmfmac4356-pcie.bin
brcmfmac 0000:02:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware brcm/brcmfmac4356-pcie.txt
Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: chip id 101
Bluetooth: hci0: N360-11
Bluetooth: hci0: BCM4354A2 (001.003.015) build 0000
bluetooth hci0: firmware: direct-loading firmware brcm/BCM4354A2-13d3-3485.hcd

License

Firmware files are licensed under Broadcom WIDCOMM Bluetooth Software License Agreement. Other parts of project are licensed under standard MIT license.

Supported devices

See DEVICES file.