[GLLUG] Does any virtualisation system provide good support for USB device forwarding?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 10:38:31AM +0100, John Winters wrote:
> Obvious alternatives are KVM and VirtualBox, both of which sort of
> seem to support USB device forwarding.  However, the documentation
> page for KVM -
> http://www.linux-kvm.org/wiki/index.php?title=UsbPassthrough - is
> simply missing, although it's referred to from various other parts
> of the documentation.  My experience of VirtualBox is limited to
> using it for desktop virtualisation.  I haven't tried it headless.

The documentation for KVM is here:

  http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/USB_Host_Device_Assigned_to_Guest

I briefly and a long time ago tried to get this to work so I could
connect an iPhone to a Windows VM (successfully, in the end).  The
main difficulty IIRC was preventing the host OS from interfering /
mounting the USB device, which stops it from being passed through to
the guest.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat