Uncrippling Bluetooth in Windows Vista RTM – Addendum
Ξ January 17th, 2007 | → 3 Comments | ∇ Windows |
Uncrippling Bluetooth in Windows Vista RTM – Addendum
What I missed the first time around and who’s still responsible.
Introduction
I wanted to take a few minutes to touch on this really quick as it seems I’ve helped project a misconception. My lack of substantial reasoning in my article Uncrippling Bluetooth in Windows Vista RTM.
The Beef
I’ve since come across some information tucked nicely away on Microsoft’s website discussing the new plans for Bluetooth. I’ve since discovered that they kept the MS Bluetooth Stack with all the profiles in RC1 and RC2 for testing purposes. That being said their final ideology is to begin enforcing driver signing on Bluetooth devices to coincide with their requirement for direct devices and generally create a more secure operating system (A potential exploit would exist on a machine that requires drivers to be signed but Bluetooth device profiles not to be. I wouldn’t be very secure if you had an unverified device being able to interact with the kernel.) They also want to reprioritize the way Bluetooth devices are handled in the operating system. Using a technology called Synchronous Connection-Oriented profiles. These profiles can only be developed on Vista machines. So this infers that the vendors, who previously expected Microsoft to knock out these generic profiles, are now required to get Vista machines and develop their profiles from square one and still be able to sign their driver using the method only available on Vista platforms.
That being said, Microsoft is still to blame for at the very least not leaving us with a backup plan. It’s completely up to the vendors and now us to find out where to download the profiles. Maybe in SP1 we’ll get a full set of profiles that have been collected from all of the vendors. And they’ll all be signed and be really shiny, I’m sure. Until that point, we’re not going to know which devices will work and which won’t. Natively with Vista’s MS Bluetooth Stack, which I’m sure still isn’t going to be as full featured as the WIDCOMM driver used in my guide
on March 21st, 2007 at 10:43 pm
I have some info about the bluetooth issue you are having. I think you will find this very very very useful.
I have a Motorola BT820 headset. It supportes headset, a2dp, and remote control.
When I paired it up with my Windows Vista computer it would install it as a Bluetooth device with no driver. Obviously because of the lack of Microsoft BT Stack support for it’s profiles.
Looking of your blog I see you mentioned the Dell 355 Bluetooth Radio. I also ready how you are using the Widcomm I have the Dell 350 in my Latitude D820. I am running Vista Ultimate x32. On a whim I downloaded the drivers for the 355 for x32. I attempted to install and of course it failed becuase the INF didn’t have my hardware ID in it. So I went into the directory of the install files and noticed all the INFs with names like bthaudiohf.inf and btavrcp.inf. Looking at these INF files closer it seemed these were profile drivers.
So I went to the Microsoft bluetooth manager, went to the properties of my device and enabled all of its available service: Audio Sync, Headset, and Remote Control. Windows detected the devices and the hardware manager showed 3 devices with no known driver, I then directed windows to look in the directory (C:\dell\drivers\R142717\Drivers) and windows immediatly installed them as their appropriate profile based devices. Eureka! My bluetooth headed started working!! Audio is perfect, the remote control function works too.
The drivers look like they support x64 as well. Hopefully this can help you out too. They also look very generic which means they could drive any profile for any bluetooth device.
on April 6th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
While the native Dell WIDCOMM based driver does in-fact include A2DP profiles it is broken still as you cannot discover services on devices such as a pda or cell phone. For me this is extreme interfering as I use my phone to access the internet via the Bluetooth Personal Area Network service that is available on my phone. In addition to that, HID profiles are a bit dodgy at best as they relate to the video driver. It’s strange but the bluetooth radio will shut off momentarily and break the driver when I close the lid on my machine. Basically Dell gave enough meat in the driver to let it install and do stereo headphones and some hands free profiles. The only thing it does over the Microsoft drivers is A2DP. So for those Dell users who only want to use their stereo headphones with Vista, then this is an excellent solution. However, for those that use HID, headphones, headsets, cellphone voice gateway routing, printing, networking over bluetooth, there’s a great deal left to be desired in Dell’s drivers.
on September 13th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Phew, well I finally got bluetooth working on vista x64 using the native bluetooth stack, luckily Dell had the right bluetooth profiles available on their homepage for x64 vista (R155463).