USB in Xen – how to make it work

ZoltarStark — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:12:42 +0000

In my previous posts I described two approaches for setting up access to USB devices in Xen guest: PCI forwarding and USB forwarding. The results were less than fantastic, I must admit. I’ve been checking different pages on the Internet looking for more advice. Unfortunately it looks like the conclusion is that at this point Xen does not support this feature. Hopefully this will get better in the future.

What can you do now? One suggested approach is to use some kind of USB over IP solution. That does involve spending some money though. USB over IP devices are about €300, a well known example are products from Digi International. Unfortunately I didn’t find any device of this type which would work with Linux clients so this looks like a bad direction to go even if it was cheaper. Another solution mentioned is using a software version of USB over IP. Again, they mostly support Windows clients. I was able to find only one that includes a Linux client – USB Server. At this point it’s in beta so it could be unstable – better test it before you use it on a production system. It includes a kernel driver (released under GPL 2) and binary only programs for the client and the server. It’s not a perfect solution since you still don’t know what’s inside of these binaries.

There are also people working on a similar solution in USB/IP Project. According to them “It is still at a *very* early development stage.” and is not stable.

I’ll try out these options and report here my findings. In the meantime if someone has experiences with any of these two solutions please comment and let us know.

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USB in Xen – how to make it work

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