Unraid 6.12.3 and Home Assistant - Unreliable Bluetooth Integration

Hi,

I updated to Unraid 6.12 and the Bluetooth devices in my Home Assistant Container (2023.7.2) started working in an erratic manner. With Unraid 6.11 I received readings from my RuuviTag and plant monitoring sensors every couple of seconds or so. With 6.12 I stop receiving readings very soon after the container is started. After a long pause (can be 15 minutes; sometimes way longer) I may get some readings, which means that the implementation is not completely broken, but the behavior is completely different from what I had in 6.11 where I never saw these kinds of issues. If I restart Home Assistant, it receives some sensor values and then stops updating again.

Some observations

• I first had this issue with 6.12.0.
• I tried removing and setting up the Home Assistant container again, but that did not fix the issue.
• I reverted back to 6.11. branch and the problem got fixed.
• I updated to 6.12.3 and the problem came back.
• Restarting Unraid, Home Assistant or the Bluetooth does not permanently fix the issue.
• I have not done any other changes or upgrades to the system besides the upgrade to Unraid 6.12.
• I was using the latest available version of the Home Assistant container in all cases.

My Setup

I am using the Bluetooth chip in my motherboard (ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming ITX). I downloaded Bluez 5.64 from here and placed it in the /boot/extra so that it would get installed when the system gets booted. I have added the line "/etc/rc.d/rc.bluetooth start" to /boot/config/go and passed /run/dbus/ > /run/dbus/ to the Home Assistant Container.

As said this has worked well in Unraid 6.11.X, and is not completely broken in 6.12.3 either, since I do get occasional sensor readings through. However, the interval between successful readings is so long and irregular that the system is practically unusable from my point of view. 

I did not find anything obvious in Home Assistant or Unraid logs that might point to the cause of the Bluetooth issue. The only ones that seem even somewhat related to Bluetooth are

From Home Assistant debug log

2023-07-15 13:41:46.808 DEBUG (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.bluetooth] Rediscovered adapters: {'hci0': {'address': '3C:21:9C:F3:ED:72', 'sw_version': 'BlueZ 5.64', 'hw_version': 'usb:v1D6Bp0246d0540', 'passive_scan': False, 'manufacturer': 'Intel Corporate', 'product': '0029', 'vendor_id': '8087', 'product_id': '0029'}}
2023-07-15 13:41:47.181 DEBUG (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.bluetooth.manager] hci0 (3C:21:9C:F3:ED:72) [connectable]: 52:EA:5F:97:AA:7A AdvertisementData(manufacturer_data={76: b'\x10\x068\x1dpX\xa3('}, tx_power=8, rssi=-97) match: set()

And from Unraid log

Jul 15 13:13:58 Torni bluetoothd[12749]: src/device.c:load_gatt_db() No cache for C4:7C:8D:66:51:7C

Has anyone encountered similar issues with Unraid 6.12? Where should I start looking for answers? I guess I can always revert back to Unraid 6.11.x again, but it would be nice to be able to use the latest version of the software.

Thank you!

Edited July 15, 20232 yr by Tomiii