[Qemu-devel] RFC: usb redirection over the network, interesting outside of spice?

[Qemu-devel] RFC: usb redirection over the network, interesting outside of spice?

[Hans de Goede]

Hi All,

Now that I have usb-1.1 passthrough  / local redirection support
working reliably (see my patch sets for this), I'm going to start
working on doing usb redirection support over the network.

The idea here is that a usb device connected to machine a, will be
available for use by the guest os running on host b (machine b).

I'm working on this because it is something which we want / need
for spice. I'm wondering if there is interest in this outside
of spice ?

I'm asking because at this moment in time the redirection support
can probably be written in a way which abstracts the transport channel
quite easily, allowing use outside of spice.

Regards,

Hans

Re: [Qemu-devel] RFC: usb redirection over the network, interesting outside of spice?

[Gerd Hoffmann]

   Hi,

> The idea here is that a usb device connected to machine a, will be
> available for use by the guest os running on host b (machine b).
>
> I'm working on this because it is something which we want / need
> for spice. I'm wondering if there is interest in this outside
> of spice ?

Sure.  The idea to support usb forwarding over vnc comes up now and 
then.  Also having a standalone app is probably useful for testing and 
development and maybe logging the communication between guest OS and device.

> I'm asking because at this moment in time the redirection support
> can probably be written in a way which abstracts the transport channel
> quite easily, allowing use outside of spice.

Yes, I think we certainly want to do that.  I think on the qemu side we 
want plumbing into chardev and spice, maybe also vnc.  On the client 
side a library (building on top of libusb?), a standalone app and 
support in spice client and maybe gtk-vnc would be good I think.

cheers,
   Gerd

[Qemu-devel] Re: RFC: usb redirection over the network, interesting outside of spice?

[Jan Kiszka]

Am 29.11.2010 11:11, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Now that I have usb-1.1 passthrough  / local redirection support
> working reliably (see my patch sets for this), I'm going to start
> working on doing usb redirection support over the network.
> 
> The idea here is that a usb device connected to machine a, will be
> available for use by the guest os running on host b (machine b).
> 
> I'm working on this because it is something which we want / need
> for spice. I'm wondering if there is interest in this outside
> of spice ?
> 
> I'm asking because at this moment in time the redirection support
> can probably be written in a way which abstracts the transport channel
> quite easily, allowing use outside of spice.

Do you know usbip [1]? I haven't looked at any details, but maybe there
is room for synergies.

Jan

[1] http://usbip.sourceforge.net/

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