LWN: Comments on "Hughes: Updating Logitech Hardware on Linux"

Wireless dongles

gdt — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:38:46 +0000

All the bluetooth mice I have used had an annoying amount of latency.

That's likely because your Broadcom Bluetooth controller hasn't loaded its firmware. The controller will fall back to inferior alternatives with substantial jitter, the controller reports firmware build 0000, and the module writes an error to dmesg with the filename of the firmware it is trying to load.

There are plenty of scripts and archives for extracting the firmware from drivers for Windows. One is github.com/winterheart/broadcom-bt-firmware; another is in the Arch distribution.

Wireless dongles

flussence — Mon, 29 May 2017 19:23:08 +0000

Wow, I learned something new!

I wanted to say here it's a feature-not-a-bug to have the USB semantics of a single host PC controlling access to your external drives (or printer ink) instead of trusting the device to not screw up... but considering the article these comments are under, I probably shouldn't be so optimistic.

Wireless dongles

gevaerts — Mon, 29 May 2017 08:18:48 +0000

(sorry, I'm a pedant, I *have* to!)

Wireless USB actually predates USB3 by a few years.

And yes, hardware is rare (does it even exist, outside prototypes?). I blame this on it not actually solving any real-world problem. Wireless was well-served before by either bluetooth or wifi. At the time, Wireless USB was faster than those, but who wants a wireless printer or hard drive that can not be shared? And who minds bluetooth speeds for keyboards and mice?

Wireless dongles

flussence — Sat, 27 May 2017 14:41:09 +0000

USB3 introduced this thing called “Wireless USB”, which supposedly lets you pair/authenticate using a cable then use the device without one thereafter. I say supposedly because I've yet to hear of any hardware that actually supports it in the years there's been a driver for it. Though with the state of regular xhci in the kernel, I'm not convinced the experience would be any less painful than BlueZ anyway.

Wireless dongles

nix — Fri, 26 May 2017 23:03:31 +0000

I was using bluetooth in the 3 -> 4 transition too, and after two breakages of every bluetooth-using program I cared about, I just didn't care enough to try any more.

I just tried to do a simple pairing with a Bluetooth keyboard (using a wifi-dongle keyboard to do it) on my Ubuntu 14.04 home cinema box (I know, I must upgrade it). Total failure, and multiple coredumps in the process. Ah well, maybe the upgrade will help...

Wireless dongles

hadess — Thu, 25 May 2017 19:37:01 +0000

> The downside, aside from the lack of standardization, is that you get two separate pairing relationships to keep in sync since the keys need to be stored on the dongle too.

Nearly. If we had the specs or protocol documentation, then we could read the "HID" pairings and automatically pass them over to Bluetooth, as well as being able to write out those "HID" pairings when you've done the Bluetooth pairing. Unfortunately, none of the hardware makers at the time (mainly Logitech and Broadcom) wouldn't give out any data about those.

Hughes: Updating Logitech Hardware on Linux

Cato — Thu, 25 May 2017 08:04:02 +0000

Hope this is more reliable than Logitech's own firmware updater on Mac, which hung and then bricked my unifying receiver...

fwupd is too complex

darktjm — Thu, 25 May 2017 00:51:18 +0000

I applaud the fact that manufacturers were convinced to cooperate and the effort involved in implementing this, but this does not solve the problem for me. I suppose this solution is great for people who can use fwupd out of the box, but I don't think it's worth trying to get it to build on my system. It has way too many dependencies (including systemd) and appears to depend on specific (probably traditionally mangled by package maintainers) versions of software I can't even find. It would be nice if I could just have a simple tool that just does the firmware update, but I'm not going to try and extract it from fwupd myself. It's not worth wasting hours of my time to fix an issue that will likely not do any attackers any good. I probably get more issues from using my laptop without disabling the touchpad (and apps' tendency to steal keyboard focus).

Wireless dongles

hadess — Wed, 24 May 2017 10:52:02 +0000

> with the mass of incompatible bluez versions and programs that only work with one version

s/mass of/two/

Unless you tested out your software in the early 2000's, you experienced 2 major versions, versions 4 and 5. Transitions are hard...

Wireless dongles

hadess — Wed, 24 May 2017 10:49:41 +0000

This behaviour has more to do with the fact that our OS doesn't support those well. I have found no one willing to take the time to help with introducing first class support for pairing those. But, when using a GNOME based Linux at least, you can drive the keyboard pairing through any pointer device. It's when both the keyboard and mouse are absent that things get a little complicated and underdeveloped.

Incredible work!

pabs — Wed, 24 May 2017 08:05:34 +0000

Open source firmware would be nice too.

Incredible work!

xav — Wed, 24 May 2017 08:01:35 +0000

Logitech will do the right thing when they'll really support Linux. But hey, better than nothing.

Wireless dongles

perennialmind — Tue, 23 May 2017 22:18:45 +0000

The vendor term for this is "HID proxy" or at least that's what CSR called it before they were swallowed into Samsung and then Qualcomm. It's how Apple dodged this particular pain point. I don't know if there's a good list of such devices, but you might find some hints in the usb2hid utility source (on git.kernel.org). The downside, aside from the lack of standardization, is that you get two separate pairing relationships to keep in sync since the keys need to be stored on the dongle too.

Hughes: Updating Logitech Hardware on Linux

jhoblitt — Tue, 23 May 2017 22:13:24 +0000

Major kudos to Richard Hughes for his continued work on fwupd. My jaw dropped the first time it installed a BIOS update on one my systems.

Bluetooth mice

bronson — Tue, 23 May 2017 21:39:40 +0000

Guessing you're sitting close to a wifi access point, microwave, or some other 2.4 GHz radiator. Moving a thing or two across the room might help.

Wireless dongles

nix — Tue, 23 May 2017 20:51:26 +0000

Bluetooth devices found:

- 1 speaker
- 1 keyboard

Use UP and DOWN cursor keys to navigate and ENTER to pair.

(whoops)

Wireless dongles

bucky — Tue, 23 May 2017 19:48:28 +0000

This reminds me of an old server we once had at work.

You had to keep a PS/2 keyboard attached to it, because the BIOS wouldn't interact with a USB keyboard.

Eventually, computers started shipping without PS/2 ports at all. THOSE machines had USB keyboard support built in. Pretty soon, built-in keyboard support was in everything. I guess because it's easier to just maintain a single code base.

I don't suppose computers will be losing their USB ports any time soon, though.

Incredible work!

likryol — Tue, 23 May 2017 19:31:34 +0000

Impressive dedication and action taken to resolve this issue by Hughes. Logitech did the right thing here, makes me feel better about using these mice. Props to Red Hat too and glad to be a GNOME user with people like Hughes behind the scenes.

Wireless dongles

Cyberax — Tue, 23 May 2017 19:29:28 +0000

Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue.

Bluetooth mice

corbet — Tue, 23 May 2017 19:18:53 +0000

I don't use the dongle at all; it's paired directly with the laptop. Works great. No lag, no dropped events.

Bluetooth mice

likryol — Tue, 23 May 2017 19:09:33 +0000

My Anywhere 2 with the default dongle on Fedora 25 works 90% of the time but has horrendous lag and dropped input leading to seemingly random movements. Pretty unusable. That scroll wheel though...

Wireless dongles

nix — Tue, 23 May 2017 19:01:11 +0000

Quite. Also, keyboards have to work, and have to work early in boot, and then have to be taken over by the OS smoothly. With USB, this works, mostly (though I have had problems with some firmware in the past). Bluetooth... I can hardly ever get Bluetooth to work on Linux, with the mass of incompatible bluez versions and programs that only work with one version or the other and massive tangle of interoperating software which all has to work for the simplest pairing to succeed, and which routinely fails. I'm glad I don't have to get that working for my *keyboard* to work. I'd not be able to type anything ever again.

Bluetooth mice

corbet — Tue, 23 May 2017 18:51:17 +0000

I've observed similar behavior; a lot of those mice are pretty much unusable. But then I got a Logitech MX Anywhere 2 and I've been happy ever since. It is possible to make a Bluetooth mouse that works as well as those using the special dongle.

Wireless dongles

linuxjacques — Tue, 23 May 2017 18:44:16 +0000

All the bluetooth mice I have used had an annoying amount of latency.

Wireless dongles

hadess — Tue, 23 May 2017 17:12:38 +0000

Only the newer ones can, and that's only in addition of the RF protocol they use. You can't connect via Bluetooth to the XBox One console, just to PCs. In Microsoft's case, it's probably to limit the third-party controllers.

Wireless dongles

dfsmith — Tue, 23 May 2017 16:48:51 +0000

FYI: XBox One controllers do use Bluetooth.

Hughes: Updating Logitech Hardware on Linux

Lekensteyn — Tue, 23 May 2017 16:36:37 +0000

Interesting work, thanks for this! In the past I RE'd the firmware update process for a Logitech T650 touchpad, but without any documentation some corner cases could have been missed (for the interested: https://git.lekensteyn.nl/t650-dfu/, https://git.lekensteyn.nl/peter/qemu/log/?h=logitech-unifying-2.2).

AFAIK on Windows, the updater would prevent other software from using the device since the exchanged messages could interfere with the update process. How is this handled by fwupd? Does it somehow prevent other processes from communicating during an update?

Also, so far it only updates the receiver, any plans to add firmware for peripherals? The Logitech T650 device for example received built-in tapping functionality via a firmware update which would benefit older kernels. And on newer kernels, you can set hid-logitech-hidpp.disable_raw_mode=1 to keep three-finger gestures and use this newer firmware to preserve tapping.

Wireless dongles

mikemol — Tue, 23 May 2017 15:51:59 +0000

When I can have a bluetooth HID present itself to the host system as a USB HID, I would *love* to go back to Bluetooth. Until then, I'll likely always have hardware that won't speak to my keyboard until the operating system is finished loading.

Wireless dongles

hadess — Tue, 23 May 2017 15:29:20 +0000

You need to pay money to put a Bluetooth logo on your device, and in your device, you need to adhere to strict rules and specs, need to interoperate with loads of broken or half-broken implementations, etc.

They used to use Bluetooth about a decade ago, with a basic "boot" mode before the device got poked by the OS drivers (see hid2hci under Linux), but it was probably easier to extend the products using their own tech on all ends.

Similar reasons why the XBox 360/One controllers don't use Bluetooth.

Wireless dongles

josh — Tue, 23 May 2017 15:28:10 +0000

First, because that wouldn't provide the same degree of lock-in.

Second, because quite frankly the user experience with Bluetooth has historically been worse. There's no fundamental reason for that, but the pairing process has a lot more friction and unreliability than these kind of receivers typically have. You can typically plug in the receiver that came with one of these devices and it'll just work, with no extra action required, even if you have no other input device available.

Wireless dongles

epa — Tue, 23 May 2017 15:20:31 +0000

I've never understood why these devices don't just use Bluetooth.