Any way to make usb passtrough work with Windows 10 HVM?

[bidam]

Hello
I set up a Windows 10 HVM on my qube laptop. I was able to passthrough my GPU and redirect audio through pulseaudio so I have a nearly fully functionnal windows and I’m very happy with this. I can run games with steam, and use visual studio, everything work smoothly.

However the only thing missing is that I can’t passthrough usb devices to the HVM. When I try, using qubes interface, I get this error message : ‘QubesExecption - Device attach failed: Failed to open data vchan connection’. Any ideas how to go around that issue?

It’s the only thing missing before I get a fully functionnal windows laptop running inside of qube, so I would really love to make this work.

Thanks

edit : I’m on R4.0 by the way.

[rtw]

I would be interested in this as well since I am in the same situation and have experienced the vchan error. I understand at least to some extent the vchan functionality as documented and I would suppose that your developers find a windows qube inherently risky since even the print spooler is “vulnerable by design” as Microsoft says about poin and print functionality. Steve Gibson opines that this should be their tag line for Windows 11.

Unfortunately, I “fixed” this for non-block devices (camera and good DAC) by adding a usb card to pci bus and assigning it to the window - 20 dollars not too bad a penalty and I just got tired of reading some of your code and wanted it fixed. I will note that usb cards that are self powered did not work after reboot. It looks like DOM0 doesn’t like to let go or windows gets confused even with your usb reset function. Windows will not see a self powered card unless I turn off the computer for a few days which I did to test.

Rich 20 Dollars poorer but richer in audio

[deeplow]

There are already some forum posts on this. Please chekout out first

Windows LTSC usb support

Hello, I’m new in the forum and in the qubes world, using Qube 4.0 since two weeks on a new laptop. I really enjoy setting in up, and within the others i create a standalone vm with Windows LTSC 2019. I install in a second moment the qubes-windows-tools experiment and solve this issue While I have problems with the screen resolution of the windows qube, I was surprised to see the usb devices connect to the qube inspite of what is written in the documentation, namely that it was not supported. …

USB Workaround for Windows VM

Hi folks, While I wait for a possible solution for sharing Qubes usb devices (not just thumbdrives) with Windows HVM, I’m looking for other alternatives. (See: Windows support in Qubes for the development discussions.) My needs: I have a webcam and thumbdrive that must be shared with the Windows HVM. I have a Yubikey (2FA USB device) that must be used to unlock the hard drive, login, and screen saver. The solutions I’ve tried: Option (A): QWT for Windows 10. Fails to install; it doesn’t c…

And for the future release of Qubes (r4.1):

Windows USB integration with R4.1

It is now available to test ability to attach USB devices to Windows. It works without QWT installation via QEMU emulation. To get it works make this steps: update with current-testing repos sudo qubes-dom0-update --enablerepo=qubes-dom0-current-testing install advanced variant linux stubdomain (now available only in current-testing repos): sudo qubes-dom0-update --enablerepo=qubes-dom0-current-testing xen-hvm-stubdom-linux-full update and restart sys-usb with current-testing repos too ena…

[rtw]

Continuing the discussion from Any way to make usb passtrough work with Windows 10 HVM?:

Thanks for the info deeplow/moderator but since I can’t stand audio or video lags I’ll stick with the 20 dollar fix. Looking forward to 4.1 but since at least for now Qubes 4.0 is my primary box with a pure windows surface laptop that I now only use with clients I am going to wait until the rc1.
Rich

[unjust]

I’m stumped on this as well. Vchan error.
Afraid I can’t go for the USB controller workaround, since Windows won’t boot if I attach certain onboard controllers.

[unjust]

Offering a bounty of $15 to whoever can help me get this working. I just wanna play some games.

[joe.blough]

@unjust

I’m stumped on this as well. Vchan error.
Afraid I can’t go for the USB controller workaround, since Windows won’t boot if I attach certain onboard controllers.

I think the vchan error basically means you can’t pass USB to Windows on R4.0.

I have a USB 3.1 port with a dedicated controller and I assigned the pci device to Windows but it doesn’t pick up my usb 3.0 flash drive. The device manager picks up the controller correctly. The funny thing is the usb-sys picks up the devices in my USB 3.1 port. The bios is set to legacy usb but turning it off didn’t help either.

I wonder if you pci passthrough only works with an external card as I’ve read some have done.