[Spice-devel] Request: Spice future features - USB

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 03/30/2011 02:47 PM, Heinz Thommen wrote:
> Hello,
> we are in development of cloud solutions (FOSS-Cloud) using the spice
> client. Currently we get couple of requests from the user community and
> potential customers:
> -how can I connect my local printer over USB?
> -how can I mount another device e.g. cd-rom?
>
> In your future features list you announce:
> USB sharing (in progress) - allows clients to share their USB devices
> with Spice servers
>
> Could yoiu please let us know more details on the questions above and
> the timeline, when you will incorporate the USB part?

WRT printer / storage device sharing, we are planning to add specific
solutions for these some time in the future (say in the next 2 years
or so).

Currently our main focus is on adding usb-redirection I've working
proof of concept code for this, it needs some cleaning up and I
need to think about (and implement) how this will work together
with live migration of virtual machines from one server to the other.

So all in all it is pretty far along. There is one caveat though,
since this uses qemu's usb host controller emulation and that currently
only supports usb 1, the emulation is limited to usb 1 devices. In the
case of mass storage devices, or printers it should work fine
with usb 2 devices too, but they will work at usb 1 speeds.

The last few weeks I've been working on some different areas of spice
where we had some high priority bugs to fix. I need to rebase my qemu
tree to something more recent then what I was working with. Once I've
done that I can send you some instructions for testing this if you
want.

Let me know if you're interested and I'll send you some testing
instructions sometime during the next week.

Regards,

Hans