I dont know enough about the host to comment on whether we should change this
API now or after release.
I think adding an address structure is a good idea.
A question about one of your open points. The spec has confused me a bit in
this regard. Isnt it up to the application to decide whether it wants to use a
public device address or a random static address? A device can contain both, so
how does one decide which one to use? I thought that was up to the app but
maybe apps dont really care about this and we can leave it up to the host?
> On Jan 26, 2017, at 6:41 AM, Andrzej Kaczmarek
> <andrzej.kaczma...@codecoup.pl> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I think it would be nice to do one more API refactoring before 1.0 release
> and simplify using BLE device address in API.
>
> The current state here is similar to what we had with UUIDs in ATT code,
> i.e. addresses are passed as pair of address type and address value and
> there is no common way to e.g. compare or copy them. What more, with
> Privacy enabled things are even more complicated since application needs to
> chose which address to use when advertising or scanning and can use
> different addresses for the same peer device.
>
> So I propose few changes:
>
> 1. Application does not specify own_addr_type in APIs
> This should be selected automatically by host. By this I mean that
> application tells host somehow at startup which address to use (public or
> random static) and host will set parameters accordingly depending on
> whether Privacy is enabled (IRK is provided) or disabled (no IRK provided).
>
> 2. Application should always use peer identity address, if possible
> Since host manages resolving list in controller already, address resolving
> will be done automatically anyway. We can then assume that for any known
> device, the address we use in API is identity address (assuming our IRK is
> provided and thus Privacy is enabled) and honestly it does not need to know
> so-called OTA address, because this is what host and controller take care
> of. The only exception here would be for new devices for which application
> will have random (RPA) address at first, but as soon as we are paired host
> should notify application about identity address of such device - for this
> new event shall be added.
>
> 3. And finally, of course, we need nice type and helpers to store and
> handle device address in uniform way:
> typedef struct {
> uint8_t type; // 0 = public, 1 = random
> uint8_t address[6];
> } ble_address_t;
>
> This is what I have in mind now. It may some time to fix all the internals,
> but before release we would just need external APIs redefined. Then we can
> work more on optimizing the internals.
>
> Open points:
> - selecting own address type could be automatic, i.e. host reads public
> address from controller, if not available tries to read static random from
> storage, if not available generates new one and stores it
> - the same for IRK, i.e. read from storage, if not available randomize new
> one
> This can be however added later and old APIs can be just marked as
> deprecated.
>
> Comments?
>
> BR,
> Andrzej
