tech questions and development priorities for bhyve

[Aryeh Friedman]

>> 3. Non-virtio pass through (specifically USB)

>  Not quite sure what you mean by 3 - is that PCI pass-through ? Note there
> is a GSoC project for USB emulation in bhyve.

A user story might help here.... one of the motivating factors for us
getting involved with virtualization was we have a web based app that
uses an automatic upload from flash drive via java web start
program.... the auto upload only works if you run it on windows and
all other OS's get a file chooser... my preferred OS for almost all
work is FreeBSD (and has been since almost 2.0.5) and we have very
limited space for new computers (or the money) so we decided to try
virtual box and found that it couldn't be used to test auto upload
because the insertion of a flash drive into the host did not get
passed along to the guest... we tried qemu and even tried some
openstack based solutions (finding out how ungodly awful openstack is
the other main motivating factor for our virtualization work) and none
of them passed the USB along to the guest... about this time we got a
contract to do some openstack work (that was later canceled) so we
ended up buying 2 machines (long story but win 32 and win 64 do not
live well on the same machine) one for openstack and one for doing
multibooting of different win32's (the win64's where handled by my
desktop)... so when the openstack project was canceled we had learned
enough about cloud computing to see a better solution and decided to
base it around bhyve... and since we already had the ears of the bhyve
community why not ask about the usb pass through issue