I currently am not using a usb qube as my laptop uses a usb keyboard. My laptop’s webcam and my cheap usb webcam that I have sitting around both don’t show up in the devices panel on the top. My laptop’s mic does however. They show up when I type lsusb in dom0 and from what I gather I could try and attach one of the usb controllers that the webcam is on to an appVM and see if it works, but Id prefer to avoid that and am willing to pay a little bit for a webcam that I could quickly swap between qubes.
Does anyone know of a 10-20 dollar usb webcam that is know to work with qubes?
I cannot thank you enough for the detailed response. I had no idea that this was possible.
That worked great and I now have a sys-usb and my webcam passed through to my appVMs just fine.
Also, I feel rather stupid because I should have asked this earlier, but I have my /boot and /boot/efi on an SD card and was wondering if that would cause any problems after boot?
I figured since I’m not hiding the controllers from dom0, there shouldn’t be any problems but does dom0 need /boot after booting? Once sys-usb takes over the controllers dom0 cant see the sd card but I don’t think this is a problem because nothing has crashed yet and I cant see why dom0 would need the /boot drive after booting.
I also figure, that if I need to make changes to the boot loader again, I could just delete sys-usb and have dom0 take over the usb controllers after a reboot so that it could make changes to /boot on the sd card. I double checked the grub and xen configs to make sure that rd.qubes.hide_all_usb isn’t in them so from my understanding that should work.
Technically, no, your computer loads all of that into RAM and keeps it there while it’s running, so it’ll still be “usable” from a userspace perspective.
There’s actually a parameter in /etc/fstab that you can write that does this: noauto. That will only mount that partition when requested. Some Linux distros do this by default for the boot partition, which is kind of cool.
It’ll only cause issues if you try and interact with any of the files that are usually in /boot (kernel upgrades, grub configuration, etc).
(I was typing this and I saw you already realised this at the end of your post )
The designers of your hardware chose to make your SD card reader as a USB device. That would make sense.
You don’t need to “delete” sys-usb. You could simply stop it from starting automatically on boot whenever you need to upgrade.
Or for the super paranoid, you can install a “decoy” kernel in the boot directory of the Qubes partition, and upgrade that, and then copy the new kernel files to your SD card.
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