Using NRF52 DK as BLE Controller on an older kernel host

[pbn4]

Hello,

recently I was going through this and the following statement concerns me:

1. First of all make sure you have a recent Linux kernel installed (at least 4.6) and a modern (5.42+) version of the BlueZ userspace tools. For some of the tools, and depending on what your distribution bundles, you might need to compile BlueZ from scratch. To do so issue the following commands:

Why is kernel version 4.6 necessary? Also, is there anything not supported by bluez 5.38 that is supported by 5.45?

I wanted to run this on kernel 4.4 with bluez 5.38. Also It's worth mentioning that I compiled samples/bluetooth/hci_uart instead of samples/bluetooth/beacon. I already noticed differences in tools names.

[Carles]

Hi there,

The kernel and BlueZ version requirements are there because of multiple fixes to issues that we found during the interaction between Zephyr and Linux/BlueZ.

For the details on what you will be able to achieve with older versions and what will not work you can address your question to the BlueZ maintainers that work with the Zephyr project. To achieve this you can either join the IRC channel #zephyrproject on freenode.net or send an email to the zephyr-devel mailing list. Additional information can be found in the Community Tools section of this page:

www.zephyrproject.org/.../how-to-contribute

[Håkon Alseth]

A quick note: Compiling on kernel version < 4.6 requires that you enable experimental to ensure that bluez also builds all the tools required for hci (btattach etc): ./configure --enable-experimental