[SOLVED] Forwarding usb to a virtual machine

[Vitaly_KoT]

Please tell me. It is impossible to forward 6 USB flash drives to a virtual machine, maximum 5 usb. Sorry for the translation, I am translating via google translator.
Proxmox 6.2
Guest OS: Windows 2012
I was looking for a solution through Google, they write that you can unlock the number of connected USBs, but how to do it?

 

[Stefan_R]

1. Use PCI passthrough to assign the VM an entire USB controller, then you can connect as much as you want
2. Pass through not the device, but a port, and use a USB hub
3. Edit /usr/share/perl5/PVE/QemuServer.pm and increase $MAX_USB_DEVICES, then reboot or restart pve services (not recommended since it will be reset on upgrade, might break other things, and will most likely still not work via the GUI, only CLI)

Keep in mind that all options other than 1. will limit your bandwidth, as all USB traffic has to go through the host user space first. High-bandwidth applications like audio or video devices might not work correctly.

 

[Vitaly_KoT]

1. Use PCI passthrough to assign the VM an entire USB controller, then you can connect as much as you want
2. Pass through not the device, but a port, and use a USB hub
3. Edit /usr/share/perl5/PVE/QemuServer.pm and increase $MAX_USB_DEVICES, then reboot or restart pve services (not recommended since it will be reset on upgrade, might break other things, and will most likely still not work via the GUI, only CLI)

Keep in mind that all options other than 1. will limit your bandwidth, as all USB traffic has to go through the host user space first. High-bandwidth applications like audio or video devices might not work correctly.

Thanks, I will try.

 

[leesteken]

• Pass through not the device, but a port, and use a USB hub

Can you please show me how to do that? I could not find it in the manual. Maybe I did not look in the right place?
If a pass through a port (usb1: host=1-13), it will work for any single device connected to it. However, when I connect a USB-hub, the VM does not see the devices.
I need to pass through each device connected to the hub separately ((usb1: host=1-13.1 usb2: host=1-13.2 usb3: host=1-13.3)), to make it work and run over 5 quickly.

I did find a work-around using something like pvesh create "/nodes/${HOSTNAME}/qemu/${VMID}/monitor" --command device_add usb-host,bus=xhci.0,hostbus=1,hostport=13.3,id=${DEVID} in /etc/udev/rules/ to automatically add any number of devices to a VM when detected by the host on a hub on a specific USB-port. But passing through the USB-hub would be much easier.

 

[Stefan_R]

Can you please show me how to do that? I could not find it in the manual. Maybe I did not look in the right place?
If a pass through a port (usb1: host=1-13), it will work for any single device connected to it. However, when I connect a USB-hub, the VM does not see the devices.

Ah does it not work? Sorry, my mistake then, I was under the impression QEMU could cope with that...

Not sure how you could do that then, I'm afraid.

 

[Vitaly_KoT]

1. Use PCI passthrough to assign the VM an entire USB controller, then you can connect as much as you want
2. Pass through not the device, but a port, and use a USB hub
3. Edit /usr/share/perl5/PVE/QemuServer.pm and increase $MAX_USB_DEVICES, then reboot or restart pve services (not recommended since it will be reset on upgrade, might break other things, and will most likely still not work via the GUI, only CLI)

Keep in mind that all options other than 1. will limit your bandwidth, as all USB traffic has to go through the host user space first. High-bandwidth applications like audio or video devices might not work correctly.

thanks again, everything works.

 

[QLP24]

@avw can you share the udev script?

 

[leesteken]

@avw can you share the udev script?

Sorry, but I don't use it anymore. It was based on this script for virtsh and I just changed it to use the command for pvesh (as show in in post #4).

 

[doge]

Can you please show me how to do that? I could not find it in the manual. Maybe I did not look in the right place?
If a pass through a port (usb1: host=1-13), it will work for any single device connected to it. However, when I connect a USB-hub, the VM does not see the devices.
I need to pass through each device connected to the hub separately ((usb1: host=1-13.1 usb2: host=1-13.2 usb3: host=1-13.3)), to make it work and run over 5 quickly.

I did find a work-around using something like pvesh create "/nodes/${HOSTNAME}/qemu/${VMID}/monitor" --command device_add usb-host,bus=xhci.0,hostbus=1,hostport=13.3,id=${DEVID} in /etc/udev/rules/ to automatically add any number of devices to a VM when detected by the host on a hub on a specific USB-port. But passing through the USB-hub would be much easier.

Hello i try to make a bash script to automate mounting a list of usb devices,
is there some code examples somewhere ?
help please

 

[rifaterdemsahin]

1. Use PCI passthrough to assign the VM an entire USB controller, then you can connect as much as you want
2. Pass through not the device, but a port, and use a USB hub
3. Edit /usr/share/perl5/PVE/QemuServer.pm and increase $MAX_USB_DEVICES, then reboot or restart pve services (not recommended since it will be reset on upgrade, might break other things, and will most likely still not work via the GUI, only CLI)

Keep in mind that all options other than 1. will limit your bandwidth, as all USB traffic has to go through the host user space first. High-bandwidth applications like audio or video devices might not work correctly.

giving the whole usb controllers on PCI crashed the debian 11 ( proxmox )

 

[leesteken]

giving the whole usb controllers on PCI crashed the debian 11 ( proxmox )

Yes PCI passthrough has lots of possible problems in itself. Please start a new thread and explain your hardware, attach the VM configuration file and show your IOMMU groups.
EDIT: Glad to see that you got it working.

 

[rifaterdemsahin]

how do i ?

show your IOMMU groups.

 

[leesteken]

how do i ?

show your IOMMU groups.

This give a nice overview: for d in /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/*/devices/*; do n=${d#*/iommu_groups/*}; n=${n%%/*}; printf 'IOMMU group %s ' "$n"; lspci -nns "${d##*/}"; done. Please also show cat /proc/cmdline to check if pcie_acs_override is active, which invalidates the output of the IOMMU groups.

Please move this to another thread as it is only tangentially related to the solved issue of this thread.