Bug 72766

This was originally filed at:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=844657

Moving this to the upstream tracker rather than have it limp along downstream.

---

USB redirection across the network is a very very usful feature. However, it seems to be limited to Spice based clients because there are no client tools that use the new usbredir package at this time.

As a result of this, usbredir is pretty much limited to Qemu VMs that support this feature.

...

It appears that the usbredirtestclient is infact a protocol testing client rather than an usbredir client that talks to the usbredir-server in the same package.

So I suppose this bug is more of a feature request than a bug :(


Hans replied:

(In reply to Hans de Goede from comment #2)
> Hi,
> 
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > It appears that the usbredirtestclient is infact a protocol testing client
> > rather than an usbredir client that talks to the usbredir-server in the same
> > package.
> 
> Correct.
> 
> So if you want to use usbredir without spice atm you can do that like this:
> 
> On the machine which has the physica; usb device  you want to share do:
> sudo usbredirserver 0c45:63f8
> 
> Where 0c45:63f8 is the usb id of the device you want to share.
> 
> Then after starting the server, start qemu with the following cmdline
> options added:
>  -readconfig /etc/qemu/ich9-ehci-uhci.cfg \
>  -chardev socket,host=localhost,port=4000,id=usbredirchardev1 \
>  -device usb-redir,chardev=usbredirchardev1,id=usbredirdev1,debug=3 \
> 
> You can find ich9-ehci-uhci.cfg here:
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/qemu/plain/docs/ich9-ehci-uhci.cfg
> 
> Or in Fedora-17, with virt-manager, you can change the USB-controller type
> to "USB 2" and add a TCP USB redirection device.
> 
> Note that qemu supports operating as a TCP-server to, so you could use
> something like:
>  -readconfig /etc/qemu/ich9-ehci-uhci.cfg \
>  -chardev socket,server,port=4000,id=usbredirchardev1 \
>  -device usb-redir,chardev=usbredirchardev1,id=usbredirdev1,debug=3 \
> 
> And then first start qemu and then have a usbredirserver-like usbredirclient
> application, connect to the qemu process to give a device to qemu, this way
> you could also disconnect the usbredir-client, and restart it with a
> different device, etc.
> 
> This does require someone writing a usbredirclient application, this should
> be easy since all the hard stuf is done by using libusbredirhost , if you
> look at libusbredirserver it is very small, just doing the tcp and driving
> the libusb select loop.
> 
> The easiest way to get a usbredirclient is probably to just modify
> usbredirserver.c so that when started with an extra cmdline option instead
> of listening it tries to build a connection to a given hostname:port itself,
> re-using the select loop, and other stuff from usbredirserver. This is
> actually a pretty easy project for some one to do, and patches for this are
> certainly welcome.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Hans