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

[Andy Smith]

Hello,

On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 05:34:08PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> It's actually a bit more subtle.  As you say, Xen takes several host
> files and constructs a virtual partition table, with each file
> corresponding to a partition on the virtually constructed disk.

You can tell it to do that, but in doing so you may well hit
problems due to assumptions that the userland makes. For example,
for a long time the grub update script on Debian got very confused
if you had an xvda1, xvda2 etc without an xvda. That lead to
complicated kernel package upgrades.

You have always been able to map a file, device, whatever as a whole
disk (xvda) in Xen, and life tends to be a bit simpler inside the VM
if you do (whether you partition it or put the filesystem directly
on it).

> There's no real reason why Linux virtual machines need to see a
> partition table at all.

Last time I tried them, the network installers for both Debian and
CentOS got a bit confused by trying to put filesystems directly onto
disk devices.

Of course, that is only one way to provision a VM and probably not
the way you would go if doing it at scale.

Cheers,
Andy

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