Bluetooth emulation for the esp32? (QEMU-166)

[AntonGue]

Hello, I'd be interested in a way to emulate the bluetooth function of my esp32-device, because I'm trying to run some tests with an ota firmware. Is there already a way that I'm missing, or is it not available (yet)?

[igrr]

We do not have Bluetooth emulation supported, and given the complexity of the underlying BT hardware I think it is rather unlikely we will implement this.

There is an alternative which is on our backlog to explore, though. For BLE, we can try to:

• run the BLE host (Bluedroid or Nimble) as part of the ESP application (emulated in QEMU)
• run the BLE controller emulator on the host. There is one available inside bluez package, for instance
• let the two of them communicate over HCI. On the ESP application side, HCI would most likely go into a UART, on QEMU side it will be translated to a TCP or a UDP socket.

I have tried setting this solution up in a Docker container a couple months back, but I didn't manage to get BlueZ (even the emulator part) running inside Docker... I'm using macOS so I couldn't try all this locally without Docker. If someone has experience in BlueZ & Docker, or knows of any other BLE Controller emulator which talks over HCI, please leave a comment.