No bluetooth device will stay connected for more than 5-10 seconds on any machine with Arch install | Arch Linux Community | Page 1

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 12:02 PM

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I'm a bit new to arch linux so I don't know 'best way' to set up bluetooth connections on arch, but I'm working off a fresh vanilla install of Arch as of this morning in reset machine attempt #4 and have tried this on multiple machines that are running Arch (I'm testing/learning and nuking repeatedly).

I started using arch earlier this month; I've never been able to get a bluetooth device to connect without it pretty much immediately disconnecting repeatedly forever. At all, but no useful errors I can see anywhere.

These bluetooth devices I've tried (mouse+keyboard combo, bluetooth mouse, bluetooth keyboard, bluetooth speakers) - all of them fail to stay connected on ANY Arch machine I've worked with so I've never known a working bluetooth setup at all in arch personally so far. These machines originally had Win11 on them, and did not have bluetooth connection issues whatsoever. These BT devices also have no problems pairing and working with multiple android devices, windows PC, or windows laptop. So it's not the hardware of the machine nor the BT devices having a problem, it's something with my arch install.

I've got bluez, bluez-util, blueman installed with iwd and networkmanager, iwd set as networkmanager's backend. I'm using XFCE4 for my DE.

I've tried blueman UI as well as bluetoothctl in terminal. Both yield the same problem, device pairs, doesn't actually do anything, and 5-10 seconds later it disconnects. Then it reconnects, disconnects, etc... forever until I remove the pairing, turn off BT, or kill the service.

I've tried reinstalling, I've tried killing the process and services, I've rebooted. I don't know what to do.

My arch install is fully up to date via pacman -Syu. Is there any other packages, drivers, or utlities I might need to get bluetooth working correctly? Is there any log file or something I can check to see if there's any useful error at all beyond its connect/disconnect state messages?

prime seal May 30, 2024, 12:20 PM

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Damn that's a lot of text.

Is this a laptop with intergrated bluetooth? USB adapter?
Can you send your journalctl -b, with these issues happening at current boot with
journalctl -b | curl -F "file=@-" 0x0.st
journalctl -u bluetooth.service | curl -F "file=@-" 0x0.st
sudo lspci -v | curl -F "file=@-" 0x0.st

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Feel free to pipe to a file and upload rather than curling to 0x0

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 12:23 PM

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This is a Mini PC (I have 6 different ones, I've installed arch on 3 of them so far) with a PCIe BT+Wifi card

prime seal May 30, 2024, 12:23 PM

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Right

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I'd wager a guess it's a MediaTek wifi+BT card.
But can't help without any substantial information

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 12:31 PM

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prime seal Damn that's a lot of text. Is this a laptop with intergrated bluetooth? USB ada...

journalctl -b | curl -F "file=@-" 0x0.st >>> http://0x0.st/XNWd.txt
journalctl -u bluetooth.service | curl -F "file=@-" 0x0.st >>> http://0x0.st/XNWn.txt
sudo lspci -v | curl -F "file=@-" 0x0.st>>> http://0x0.st/XNW5.txt

prime seal May 30, 2024, 12:31 PM

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sweet

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 12:31 PM

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I've been at random trying to poke at making bluetooth work for a few weeks, but that's latest boot with one device attempt from what I was trying earlier

prime seal May 30, 2024, 12:32 PM

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with the bluetooth connecting and reconnecting etc?

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 12:32 PM

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yeah

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half of the crazy problems I've run into ended up being permissions related (spent a week trying to figuree out why a USB device wasn't communicating with my code), is that possible with bluetooth too?

prime seal May 30, 2024, 12:46 PM

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bluetooth.service was a duplicate link

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 12:46 PM

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oh oops

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updated the link

prime seal May 30, 2024, 12:47 PM

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Do you have anything related to power management regarding pci in your bios settings?

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 12:48 PM

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not sure, I'd have to check. this newest machine has a tonof settings in BIOS as I took a glance at it beforee I dropped arch on here

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I'll brb and take a look

prime seal May 30, 2024, 12:51 PM

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"ASPM"

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 12:55 PM

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don't think I've seen "ASPM" before; I have sections for RC ACPI Settings, Power & Performance, ACPI D3Cold Settings, and ACPI Settings

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but after I kept digging I did find ASPM setting listed under PCI Express Configuration

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it's set to L1, with options for Disable, L0s, L1, and L0sL1

prime seal May 30, 2024, 12:58 PM

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Is battery life of a huge concern?

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 12:58 PM

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very much so; this is for a wearable XR computer I am building

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I wouldn't be bothered if I lost 10min though

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but if I'm losing 30%+ of my battery life that'd be a problem

prime seal May 30, 2024, 1:00 PM

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Gotcha

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lspci -v has no mention of bluetooth capabilities, so it might be mentioned with lsusb

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 1:05 PM

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📎 btdev.txt

prime seal May 30, 2024, 1:12 PM

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cool now we know soemthing about it

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Check if /sys/class/bluetooth exists

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 1:36 PM

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yup

prime seal May 30, 2024, 1:56 PM

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dusk pulsar yup

output of lsmod?

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 2:27 PM

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📎 lsmod.txt

prime seal May 30, 2024, 2:46 PM

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do you have btmgmt installed

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running extinfo in btmgmt could give some good info.
Need to leave for a while now though

dusk pulsar May 30, 2024, 2:58 PM

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I don't know what btmgmt is, do you mean bluetoothctl?

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ah, you mean the mgmt submenu in bluetoothctl

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[bluetooth]# Primary controller (hci0,USB)
[bluetooth]# 
[bluetooth]# hci0:    Primary controller
[bluetooth]#     addr 8C:F8:C5:7C:4D:35 version 11 manufacturer 2
[bluetooth]#     supported settings: powered connectable fast-connectable discoverable bondable link-security ssp br/edr le advertising secure-conn debug-keys privacy configuration static-addr phy-configuration wide-band-speech 
[bluetooth]#     current settings: powered bondable ssp br/edr le secure-conn wide-band-speech 
[bluetooth]# hci0:    Configuration options
[bluetooth]#     supported options: public-address 
[bluetooth]#     missing options: 
[bluetooth]# ```

dusk pulsar May 31, 2024, 2:11 AM

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out of the box idea, is it possible something is double-processing somehow?

dusk pulsar May 31, 2024, 3:51 AM

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.... I don't know how or why, but it's working now? It won't auto-connect to one device though, I have to tell it to connect manually (unfortunately it's my mouse+keyboard device I want to use).

Only thing I did different perhaps is fully shutting off and removing power to the machine earlier today; not sure why it wasn't working before after reboots though.

prime seal May 31, 2024, 6:10 AM

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dusk pulsar .... I don't know how or why, but it's working now? It won't auto-connect to on...

Only thing I did different perhaps is fully shutting off and removing power to the machine earlier today; not sure why it wasn't working before after reboots though.

This has unironically been a fix for some Wifi+BT cards in laptops I've helped with.

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remove battery,unplug, press start button for halv a min

dusk pulsar May 31, 2024, 6:28 AM

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yeah suddenly all of my bluetooth devices began working - only problem left is that my input device will not auto-reconnect like all of the other devices do. I don't know if there's some way to force a connect action when the device is detected from scanning

prime seal May 31, 2024, 6:32 AM

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there are solutions for that but can't remember on the top of my head

dusk pulsar May 31, 2024, 6:39 AM

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thanks for your time in trying to figure out what was wrong 🙇‍♂️

dusk pulsar May 31, 2024, 8:02 AM

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Managed to make a timer every 10s and systemd unit service to check connection status by bluetooth MAC and attempt to connect if it's not connected. Got it working flawlessly 👌

#No bluetooth device will stay connected for more than 5-10 seconds on any machine with Arch install