From Spice

At this points the requirements are not clear. The main ones are unspecified, but could be (in no particular order):

• booting from usb mass storage devices (disk-on-key, external harddrives)
  • Similar to booting from a remote (on-client-machine) cdrom, partition, etc.
• accessing usb mass storage devices (subset of accessing a remote directory)
• web cameras
• printers (subset of printer remoting)
• smart phones
• smart cards
• digital cameras
• devices with no driver under linux

Other requirements which are probably not main but still not defined:

• usb serial devices
• audio devices (output/input)
• keyboard and mice (extra keys and strange keyboard support is also fixable in spice itself)
  • Only works if there are two e.g. keyboards connected to the client (one to be used by the client, one by the guest)

The implementations we are considering include:

• specific solutions for top requirements, don't do any usb remoting
  • usb 2.0 is hard, possibly not worth it
  • usb 1.1 is easy but doesn't cover the top requirements
• implement usb 1.1 and specific solutions for top requirements
  • support all isoteric low bandwidth devices (possible customer need)
  • more work
• investigate usb 2.0 support

Requirement/Solution matrix:

	specialized (requires client driver)	1.1 only + specialized	2.0
Boot	partial/good (general boot from file/device)	+	+
Mass Storage	+ (general remote fs remoting)	+ (same)	+
Printing	+	+ (same or 1.1 guest driver based)	+
Webcam	+ (better performance)	+ (direct 1.1 or specialized)	+
Smart cards	-	+	+
Smart phones	-	+ (low speed)	+
Keyboard/Mice	-	+	+

For actual usb support we are considering the following [[1]] based solution:

• client to host use usb2ip, wrapped in a spice channel w or w/o authentication
• host to guest uses qemu usb 1.1 and we develop usb 2.0 support (or not)

Qemu current usb support:

• booting from a local iso as if it was a usb mass storage device (requires Seabios 0.6.0. the current Seabios in RHEL-6 (0.5.1) does not support it)
  • qemu-system-x86_64 -cpu kvm64 -usb -usbdevice disk:/store/iso/Fedora-12-x86_64-Live.iso
  • git clone git://git.linuxtogo.org/home/kevin/seabios.git seabios

Other vm's and remoting solutions implementing this:

Virtual box support according to the [[2]] page: (available only in the closed source version)

• USB support
  • VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and supports passing through USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices to virtual machines.
• USB over RDP
  • This is a combination of the RDP server and USB support allowing users to make USB devices available to virtual machines running remotely.

VMWare?