Hope for USB support?

[Alexander Eichner]

--- Bernhard Froehlich <decke at bluelife.at> schrieb am Di, 12.10.2010:

> Von: Bernhard Froehlich <decke at bluelife.at>
> Betreff: Re: Hope for USB support?
> An: "Sam Fourman Jr." <sfourman at gmail.com>, "Kevin Oberman" <oberman at es.net>
> CC: emulation at freebsd.org
> Datum: Dienstag, 12. Oktober, 2010 08:12 Uhr
> ----- Ursprüngliche Mitteilung
> -----
> > On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:29 AM, Kevin Oberman <oberman at es.net>
> wrote:
> > > I know that it is a long shot, especially with
> Oracle at the helm VB on
> > > the corporate side, but USB support for
> VirtualBox is the one piece I
> > > am missing that forces me to keep a bootable
> Windows system around.
> > > 
> > > Is there any hope of seeing USB on VB with
> FreeBSD as the host and
> > > Windows as the guest OS?
> > 
> > I could use this as well, and I know of at least 2
> others.
> > 
> > I guess a good starting point would be to ask, what is
> the scope of
> > work that needs to be done to add USB support to
> Virtual box in
> > FreeBSD
> 
> That work has already been done. I know that Alexander
> Eichner has already working USB support since some time. I
> was also told that the only possible way of getting a PUEL
> version with USB support is if a company is interested in
> it. So that will probably cost some money. But if you are
> actually interested in it please ask the virtualbox people
> from oracle about it because I don't even know how much
> money they want for it.
> 
> --
> Bernhard Fröhlich
> http://www.bluelife.at/

working USB support is a bit excessive ;). The code is very sketchy and was tested only with USB mass storage devices. There is still a lot of work to be done until it is stable and can be used in a productive environment. One missing part is a kernel driver which captures the devices to prevent others from accessing the device.
USB 1.1 is open source since some time now btw. so everyone can have a look and improve the code.

See http://www.virtualbox.org/browser/trunk/src/VBox/Devices/USB/freebsd
and http://www.virtualbox.org/browser/trunk/src/VBox/Main/freebsd/USBProxyServiceFreeBSD.cpp for example.