Getting Bluetooth working on the Dell XPS 9550 running Kali Linux

For the most part the Dell XPS 9550 has great compatibility with Kali Linux and Linux generally in more recent kernel versions, aside from one area, the Broadcom wireless card some variants ship with.

You could go fully nuclear and replace the wireless card with an Intel one, which some have done, but for Bluetooth the issue isn’t the card, it’s likely missing firmware.

Inspecting dmesg, we see some interesting entries:

[    9.959255] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: chip id 102
[    9.960250] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: features 0x2f
[    9.976300] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM20703A1
[    9.977287] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM (001.001.005) build 0000
[    9.977316] bluetooth hci0: firmware: failed to load brcm/BCM-0a5c-6410.hcd (-2)
[    9.977320] bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for brcm/BCM-0a5c-6410.hcd failed with error -2
[    9.977323] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: Patch brcm/BCM-0a5c-6410.hcd not found

Essentially, there is no Broadcom firmware available for Bluetooth. Despite having the various firmware/firmware-nonfree packages installed, the Broadcom Bluetooth firmware is not present in /lib/firmware/brcm. Looking at other Linux distributions, it could also be a case of the filename not matching what is expected, but in the case of Kali Linux on the 2020.1 release, the firmware is missing entirely.

Fortunately, we can add the firmware ourselves. You can run the following with a terminal with root, so you can write directly within the brcm firmware folder.

cd /lib/firmware/brcm
wget https://github.com/winterheart/broadcom-bt-firmware/blob/master/brcm/BCM20703A1-0a5c-6410.hcd -O BCM-0a5c-6410.hcd

Caution should always be used when pulling firmware from “unknown sources”.

This has downloaded the correct firmware and named it to what dmesg is reporting that couldn’t be loaded. Now reboot and the firmware should be loaded!

Because the Broadcom wireless card is essentially a WiFi+Bluetooth combo card, it requires you to have working WiFi firmware, otherwise the Bluetooth functionality is unlikely to work properly. In the case of the Dell XPS 9550, this firmware is included by the firmware-brcm80211 package. Although the bcrmfmac firmware has it’s own issues..

For Kali Linux, because of it’s default policy of not enabling network services, you will need to start the bluetooth service:

systemctl start bluetooth

You will need to do this on each startup, unless you override the blacklisting in /usr/sbin/update-rc.d.