I’m talking about device - e.g. WiFi or BT dongle (or even ethernet)… or whatever… I’d never bother trying to mount a USB drive in a VM - probably easier to create an image file and mount the file as a disk to the VM…
USB device (not storage) passthrough in VirtualBox is pretty easy…
It’s way more tricky in KVM on Linux - e.g. you have to modify your grub config (hmmm - what happens if you’re not using grub?) and tell it to use IOMMU and reboot and then you have to do some other stuff to stop the device driver (for the desired device) from running in the host OS so it can be passed through to a VM…
Yes, you cant have two OS’s accessing the same device.
OK… you mean USB device, but not a flash drive
I have looked at those device hardware settings in virt-manager, but never tried it? I have never needed a VM to directly control a device . I guess using a GPU would be one case..
I happily used my Canon inkjet printers for years, even with Linux, as Turboprint offered quite good support for special functions. However, I had a “borrowed” service program from a Canon tech. person, and it could do many internal settings on the printer, the one I needed was to reset the waste ink counter. That program ran on Windows only, and I did this from a Windows VM with the printer atteched to it “directly”.
I must be missing what you are saying- I do this all the time in virt-manager also-very easy. When Vm is running you just choose “redirect USB device” from drop down menu of “Virtual Machine” Then you choose the usb device- like your webcam etc. Spice is used-for on the fly (which I prefer) OR you can also just add them as persistent on boot pass-through.
service program from a Canon tech. person, and it could do many internal settings on the printer, the one I needed was to reset the waste ink counter. That program ran on Windows only, and I did this from a Windows VM with the printer atteched to it “directly”.