USB Headphones not working after creating sys-usb

User Support
1

I have a pair of wireless USB headphones and these were working out of the box since I installed qubes however now I have created a sys-usb qube to allow one of my qubes to access a specific USB device. A side effect of doing this is that dom0 no-longer has my headphones and so there is no sound.

In the device attach GUI it lists all the qubes apart from dom0 as options to attach it to. I tried to attach it to the qube producing audio however that didn’t work. I then bypassed the no dom0 limitation by running:

qvm-usb attach dom0 sys-usb:x

Now when I go to the attach device menu it shows that the USB headset is connected to dom0, however there is no sign of it being available in PulseAudio.

I don’t really want to revert fully and remove the sys-usb as I still need it to pass the other USB device to one of my qubes however it’s annoying to have no audio because of this.

Does anyone know how I can fix this?

2

Ok I think doing qvm-usb attach dom0 is actually doing nothing. Seems it’s not possible to attach USB devices to dom0 via sys-usb. Wondering what the alternatives are.

3

This may be only tangentially related, but as a matter of deliberate security policy once a USB device is detatched from dom0 and given to some other qube (like sys-usb), it will not automatically go back to dom0 when that other qube shuts down. It could conceivably be manually re-attached, but that’s very strongly discouraged, for security reasons (i.e., the USB device has been attached to something a lot less trusted and shouldn’t be reconnected to dom0, which is the one thing on your system you absolutely cannot survive being hacked).

4

Why would you attach them to dom0 anyway? Create sys-audio and you’d be on the go, most probably.