hcitool lescan does not work on Bluetooth version 5

Question

It has turned out to me that hcitool is not capable of running lescan on Bluetooth v5.X hardware. Running sudo hcitool lescan would result in this error: Set scan parameters failed: Input/output error.

The community suggests to use bluetoothctl instead (e.g. here) but gatttool is dependent on hcitool for scanning ble devices. While gatttool serves as a ble backend on many apps, still no solution is provided to resolve the Input/output error mentioned above. Does anybody know how to resolve the above error?

I have tested the full functionality of my BLE on Windows 10 but in Ubuntu I have failed so far. My laptop has the following bluetooth hardware:

$ hciconfig -a
hci0:   Type: Primary  Bus: USB
    BD Address: 4C:1D:96:30:83:6E  ACL MTU: 1021:4  SCO MTU: 96:6
    UP RUNNING 
    RX bytes:8099 acl:34 sco:0 events:591 errors:0
    TX bytes:11990 acl:34 sco:0 commands:452 errors:0
    Features: 0xbf 0xfe 0x0f 0xfe 0xdb 0xff 0x7b 0x87
    Packet type: DM1 DM3 DM5 DH1 DH3 DH5 HV1 HV2 HV3 
    Link policy: RSWITCH SNIFF 
    Link mode: SLAVE ACCEPT 
    Name: 'xxxx'
    Class: 0x0c010c
    Service Classes: Rendering, Capturing
    Device Class: Computer, Laptop
    HCI Version: 5.1 (0xa)  Revision: 0x100
    LMP Version: 5.1 (0xa)  Subversion: 0x100
    Manufacturer: Intel Corp. (2)

I have Ubuntu 20.04 with bluez v5.53.

Answer 1

gatttool and hcitool were both deprecated back in 2017.

D-Bus API is documented at: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/bluetooth/bluez.git/tree/doc

And there are examples at: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/bluetooth/bluez.git/tree/test.

For exploration on the command line then either btmgmt or bluetoothctl should cover most situations.