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usbredir: A protocol for sending USB device traffic over a network connection
- sipofwater 3y ago[flagged]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoNice bot account.
- naikrovek 3y agoDoes this offer anything over USB/IP?
- k8svet 3y agoI think just that it's plugged in at the SPICE level. So I guess you could redirect a USB device into a guest that isn't running Linux and can't run usb/ip? But also, this is how usb redirection works with virt-viewer/virt-manager, I'm fairly sure.
- naikrovek 3y agoUSB/IP works fine on Windows and MacOS, though MacOS has no ability to use devices shared by USB/IP; it can only share devices to others. What is this “SPICE level” you mentioned?
- touisteur 3y agohttps://www.spice-space.org/spice-user-manual.html https://www.spice-space.org/spice-user-manual.html that qemu uses a lot.
- k8svet 3y agoImagine you had a qemu/libvirt guest that understands USB, but doesn't have support for USB/IP in "kernel/userspace". usbredir gets your device to qemu, looking like it's a USB device attached to the VM, without cooperation from the guest.
- naikrovek 3y ago“Without cooperation from the guest” is the bit of info I was missing. Thank you.
- touisteur 3y agoNow I'm wondering whether someone has built support for this in rust-vmm...
- WhatIsDukkha 3y agoThe one hack I keep hoping <someoneelse> will do the actual work for is - redirecting my steamdeck control via usb to my linux gaming rig and expose it as a usb device(s) for steaminput. It seems like a natural and perhaps even "straightforward" hack but I've seen no evidence of one so far, perhaps there is something in usb that limits the ability to proxy it correctly.
- KeplerBoy 3y agoSounds like something Valve should make. Kinda weird they haven't so far.
- ShamelessC 3y agoValve's "remote play" allows one to play games on another host computer via your Steam Deck as though you are plugged straight. If you don't need the video streaming, you can lower the settings. edit; oh nm, user wants a direct wired connection to work.
- jxy 3y agoit may not be practical given the possible high latency.
- MisterTea 3y agoOn Plan 9 I just rimport the remote machines /dev/usb. Since this is all over 9P it can go over any 2-way pipe, even rs232.
- all2 3y agoAnd, the linux kernel has plan 9 FS drivers. [0] [0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/9p.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/9p.html
- alchemist1e9 3y agoIs Plan 9 alive and kicking?
- MisterTea 3y agohttp://9front.org/releases/ http://9front.org/releases/
- rcarmo 3y agoDepends. There are still many enthusiasts (even new ports to random chipsets), but there is also a bit of a schism between the 9front folk and… let’s say our current timeline. The good news is that there are interesting things going on, fortunately none of which related to current tech trends.
- MisterTea 3y ago> but there is also a bit of a schism between the 9front folk and… let’s say our current timeline. As a 9front user who attended IWP9 the past two years (just was in Philly this past weekend) this really isn't the case anymore.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoPlan 9 is like BSD; the original is no longer developed, but its forks ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Derivatives_and_forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Derivati... ) are healthy enough.
- tombert 3y agoThere was a thing that was around 10 or 11 years ago called "Wireless USB", and it was actually kind of cool. It did exactly what it sounds like, you could plug in two different arbitrary USB devices into hubs or a computer that supported wireless USB, and the computer would just recognize it as a vanilla USB device. I don't actually know why it never caught on, I thought it was neat, and it seemed to work fine. I guess due to the popularity and ubiquity of bluetooth? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB EDIT: Looks like it was more than 10 years ago, circa 2009 or so. Time has no meaning.
- codetrotter 3y agoFirst time I heard about Wireless USB was just the other day, in a video looking at a luggable computer from 2006. https://youtu.be/OO5hYhdxIuk https://youtu.be/OO5hYhdxIuk Video is worth a watch although it also doesn’t give an answer for why Wireless USB actually disappeared. I was wondering after watching that video, if it could be due to security concerns? Like, is the Wireless USB protocol encrypted? And if so, does it use sufficiently strong encryption? I did find a document that talks a bit about Wireless USB encryption. https://cdn.teledynelecroy.com/files/appnotes/wireless_usb_encryption.pdf https://cdn.teledynelecroy.com/files/appnotes/wireless_usb_e...
- tombert 3y agoI actually saw that video, but I had heard of Wireless USB for awhile. My manager at my first job after dropping out of college the first time got it for his computer and he was super excited. At least according to Wikipedia, it was encrypted.
- lupusreal 3y agoThere's "encrypted", and there's encrypted. WEP for wifi was encryption, but cracking it was so trivial that for some years it was practical to crack yourself access to wifi wherever you were on a casual whim. Still, even if the encryption was very weak, wireless wifi sounds appealing to me, at least for my old trusty wired mouse. Somebody snooping on or spoofing my mouse seems like an academic threat.
- sandreas 3y agoSounds a bit like USB/IP (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/USB/IP https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/USB/IP). Is this a new thing?
- eqvinox 3y agoBoth projects seem to be >10 years old at this point… might be a case of "convergent evolution"?
- sandreas 3y agoProbably... I thought of passing my iPod Nano 7g through USB/IP to my Proxmox Windows iTunes VM, but I never had the urge to do it. Although it'd probably work and would be great in combinaton with Wireguard on vacation, I did not want to setup a "risky" driver / kernel module on my main proxmox server :-) USB passthrough always was enough.
- ktm5j 3y agoI'm on my phone so I can only do so much digging, but from the usbip sourceforge page that's linked above, it says that development has moved into the Linux kernel: For Linux, the source code of usbip was merged into the staging tree, and finally has been moved to the mainline since Linux-3.17. Development is ongoing in the kernel community, not here. Linux distributions will provide binary packages of usbip.*
- andrewmcwatters 3y agoRemember Remote Disc from Mac OS X? https://support.apple.com/en-us/101323 https://support.apple.com/en-us/101323
- paulkon 3y agoI'm running virtualhere on thousands of raspberry pi's sharing various USB devices to cloud machines over vpn. It's been working without issues for years now. Seems to be a solo developer in Australia that's been working on it for a really long time. https://www.virtualhere.com/ https://www.virtualhere.com/
- kotaKat 3y ago$49 and a byzantine per-server-cannot-be-transferred license is not palatable to me. I hate hardware-bound licensing.
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoWould you rather like a monthly subscription per client?
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y agoThey didn't say anything about monthly subscriptions.
- eps 3y agoOh, knock it off. The reality is that licenses must be restricted because people cheat, steal and pirate. Hate them instead. Besides $49 is dirt-cheap for what it is, especially considering it covers all future versions.
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoWhat possible use case is this for
- zymhan 3y ago> This USB server solution is perfect for allowing USB devices to be used remotely over a LAN network, over the Internet, or in the Cloud without the USB device needing to be physically attached to remote client machine.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 3y agoSo basically this a USB device server but you can BYO hardware. Use cases for USB device servers (according to https://www.seh-technology.com/products/usb-deviceserver.html https://www.seh-technology.com/products/usb-deviceserver.htm...): external disks dongles card readers telephone systems barcode scanners medical devices mobile gauges output devices audio/video streaming devices scanners etc. ...connecting a computer to a USB device that is further away than what USB is physically limited to (distance wise).
- 2024throwaway 3y agoThis would have been great for me to have around 25 years ago, when I wanted to mount a USB web cam in my bedroom window on the second floor and connect it to a computer in my basement. I was a dumb middle school kid and just spliced the usb wires onto Ethernet cable ends, and plugged them into the existing Ethernet run. That’s when I learned about maximum USB lengths the hard way, by frying some perfectly good hardware.
- dTal 3y agoI would not expect this hack to fry hardware - at worst, voltage drop, interference, signal distortion, and impedance mismatch will simply cause the device to not work. But I've successfully run USB 2.0 over 30ft cables despite it being illegal per spec, so your idea wasn't radically wrongheaded. "Fried" is an extreme result - are you sure you didn't just connect V+ and V- backwards or something?
- 2024throwaway 3y agoIt being 25 years ago, I’m not sure of anything. But glad to know I’m not too far off or alone.
- worewood 3y agoYeah, probably just jerry-rigged an extension and plugged V+ into a data line or something like that. Properly wired, it just wouldn't detect the device.
- dotnet00 3y agoDoesn't WSL2 use something very similar for forwarding usb devices from Windows to the Linux VM? Through "usbipd"
- naikrovek 3y agoYes, Microsoft has documentation on how to set up USB/IP for connecting USB devices to the WSL2 VM. It works quite well, in my experience.
- tamimio 3y agoFunny how yesterday I was using Winding Sandbox to test a software and wanted to connect an iPhone to it, problem was that there’s not interface like a fully fledged VM and had to use VMware instead, maybe this will do the trick?
- naikrovek 3y agoUSB/IP works fine on Windows, and there are a couple of good open source packages for it. It works well.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoWhat’s input latency and throughput on this like? Would it support near native keyboard / mouse, webcam or display output? What about mass storage devices?
- kimown 3y agohttps://www.usb-over-network.com/usb-over-network-download.html https://www.usb-over-network.com/usb-over-network-download.h... I have used this software for adb debugging in rdp window10, it's really cool, but it don't meet all cases.
- j45 3y agoA software based Tibbo for usb, awesome! https://tibbo.com/ https://tibbo.com/
- klinquist 3y agoIt may not be well known that VMWare Fusion supports this. I run Windows on a Mac Mini functioning as an ESXi server. From my Macbook Pro, I can connect to it with Fusion Pro and attach USB devices to the Windows VM. I use this to program ham radios and troubleshoot my vehicle with Toyota Techstream + USB OBD2 adapter.
- lynx23 3y agousbip is a thing, is even a Debian package...
- apt-get 3y agoI'd like to get a VDI infrastructure setup for me and my partner -- something that enables both of us to run our computers with a single big machine, and not have cables running everywhere through the house, while being able to sit wherever we want and use our infra from any given place. At the moment, I've brainstormed: - A main server that runs some type 1 hypervisor (Xen or Proxmox, will need to see which is more adequate) - Light "client" devices (laptop, for example), that may either be connected in a wired manner to the server (e.g. separate desks), or remoting into it through Wireguard. Each desk will feature a KVM-style setup with a docking station that offers screens, keyboard, and a range of USB ports. - Individual VMs for running our respective OSes to our preference, some flavor of linux distro. Inputs from the client device (e.g. USB, Keyboard, Screen) should be forwarded / matched to the VM. - A windows VM for gaming, running two sessions for each of us: GPU passthrough is a must. I would like to make use of Looking Glass somehow, if possible either through the Linux VM on the same server, or on the client machine. The latter would probably be better for performance, I suppose, given you don't have to forward input devices twice... but I'm also worried about whether the buffer-copy mechanisms from Looking Glass would work with such a setup. So far, I'm looking into Moonlight/Sunshine as a general desktop redirection setup: my hope is that I can pass something close to direct framebuffers on an ethernet connection while at home, and switch to compression while I'm away, hoping to achieve as little latency as possible in all cases (so giving absolute priority on the host to the streaming process, if possible, kind of like an RT system). One notable thing is that Sunshine by itself doesn't support generic USB redirection. Has anyone tried using usbredir for this purpose? In general, it's hard to find relevant information for this kind of home hypervisor setup with a focus on gaming/latency and general transparency all around... would appreciate tips if anyone's attempted something similar before. Thanks!
- actionfromafar 3y agoThere is also USB-IP. https://usbip.sourceforge.net/ https://usbip.sourceforge.net/
- wtf_is_up 3y agoI used this the other day with some of my proxmox VMs and it worked amazingly well. Pretty nice to be able to pass my usb via spice instead if needing to plug it into the server.