[vbox-dev] Supported Remote USB Devices

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Hi Ira,

On 23.05.2013 20:06, Ira Hill wrote:
> Everyone,
>
>     My goal is to use a usb data acquisition device (National Instruments
> USB-6009) over remote usb. My host is Ubuntu x86-64 running Windows XP
> as the guest. I'm connecting to my virtual session with rdesktop-vrdp on
> my x86 laptop running Arch linux. Using usb thumb-drives and other
> storage devices work great over remote usb. Unfortunately, the data
> acquisition device does not work properly over remote usb.
>
>    The data acquisition device does show up in the virtual machine but
> the National Instruments software says the hardware has an unknown
> failure. I'm guessing the hardware initialization process isn't working
> smoothly over remote usb. Is there any chance in getting such devices
> working over remote usb? Also, the device does work in my Windows XP
> guest if I plug it directly into the host machine.

This problem description (locally it works, remotely it fails) hints 
that the device needs isochronous transfers (would need to be confirmed 
by looking at the endpoint descriptors, please provide the output of 
"lsusb -v -s <bus>:<device>"), which we didn't attempt to implement over 
the remote USB redirection. The network latency/timing jitter would 
cause a lot of transmission problems due to the generally very tight 
deadlines, which we're struggling to meet in the local case already.

If you happen to have a USB webcam (99% of them use isoc transfers) or a 
USB audio device you could confirm this yourself. Locally they generally 
work fine (with sporadic glitches when the non-realtime behavior of the 
involved OSes and VirtualBox causes a transfer to miss the deadline), 
and remotely there's no success as the isoc transfers simply don't happen.

Klaus

>
> Thanks in advance,
> Ira