[vbox-dev] USB filtering on Windows

[Ivo Smits]

While looking into the VirtualBox USB filtering code for Windows, I 
noticed that, even for manually attached USB devices, the filtering code 
relies only on some properties of the USB device (vendor ID, product ID, 
some other IDs and descriptors) to identify the device to filter. While 
this is generally "good enough", it might filter the wrong device (if 
the user connects multiple similar devices to the system, which is quite 
likely in my usage scenario). So I went to look for a solution...

On the kernel side, there appears to be a 
IOCTL_INTERNAL_USB_GET_TOPOLOGY_ADDRESS 
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-nl/library/windows/hardware/ff540164(v=vs.85).aspx) 
which would allow the filter driver to get an unique identification of 
the USB controller and the path of hub ports to the device. This should 
uniquely identify the device, as long as it is not unplugged.

On the user mode side, the PCI bus, device and function numbers can be 
obtained from a query (SPDRP_BUSNUMBER and SPDRP_ADDRESS) against the 
USB controller device node (which is available as the root of the USB 
enumeration anyway), and the path of hub ports can be constructed as the 
USB tree is enumerated.

This information can be stored in a filter structure in string format 
(eg 
"PciBusNumber/PciDecideNumber/PciDeviceAddress/RootHubPort/Hub1Port/Hub2Port/..."). 
Combined with Vid and Pid, this should provide sufficient information to 
uniquely identify a USB device on a port before and after "virtual 
replugging". Added bonus: it could be used to forward a specific host 
USB port to a VM, regardless of what is plugged into that port.

Any technical reason why this is not yet implemented? Am I missing 
something? If not, I'd better start working on it.

Ivo