From: Dominik Csapak Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2016 13:25:28 +0000 (+0200) Subject: add section about usb passthrough X-Git-Url: https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-docs.git;a=commitdiff_plain;h=685cc8e0ba0d0e9220180b33f5b5fa3f8b0c3e1e add section about usb passthrough Signed-off-by: Dominik Csapak --- diff --git a/qm.adoc b/qm.adoc index 342966d..b365e9b 100644 --- a/qm.adoc +++ b/qm.adoc @@ -261,6 +261,40 @@ systems. When allocating RAMs to your VMs, a good rule of thumb is always to leave 1GB of RAM available to the host. +USB Passthrough +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ +There are two different types of USB passthrough devices: + +* Host USB passtrough +* SPICE USB passthrough + +Host USB passthrough works by giving a VM a USB device of the host. +This can either be done via the vendor- and product-id, or +via the host bus and port. + +The vendor/product-id looks like this: *0123:abcd*, +where *0123* is the id of the vendor, and *abcd* is the id +of the product, meaning two pieces of the same usb device +have the same id. + +The bus/port looks like this: *1-2.3.4*, where *1* is the bus +and *2.3.4* is the port path. This represents the physical +ports of your host (depending of the internal order of the +usb controllers). + +If a device is present in a VM configuration when the VM starts up, +but the device is not present in the host, the VM can boot without problems. +As soon as the device/port ist available in the host, it gets passed through. + +WARNING: Using this kind of USB passthrough, means that you cannot move +a VM online to another host, since the hardware is only available +on the host the VM is currently residing. + +The second type of passthrough is SPICE USB passthrough. This is useful +if you use a SPICE client which supports it. If you add a SPICE USB port +to your VM, you can passthrough a USB device from where your SPICE client is, +directly to the VM (for example an input device or hardware dongle). + Managing Virtual Machines with 'qm' ------------------------------------