USB redirection over the network with qemu

I've been working on USB redirection over the network for qemu / spice for a while now. And I'm happy to report I've something which is good enough to invite others to test it. In the mean time Gert Hoffmann (kraxel) has been working on cleaning up the EHCI support which was submitted to the qemu-devel list about a year ago, making it suitable to get merged. My qemu git tree is based on Gert's tree, so it has prelimary USB2 support too. Note that the USB2 support works best when used together with the network redirection code over localhost, that seems to be more reliable at the moment then using qemu's direct usb host redirection code.

So if you want to play around with this here are some installation instructions. These instructions assume a 64 bit Red Hat or Fedora installation. If you've a 32 bit installation, or are using a distribution which does not use /usr/lib64 for 64 bit installations (such as Debian and Ubuntu) replace /usr/lib64 with /usr/lib in the below instructions.

First of all you will need my version of libusb, which is has a new libusb_get_device_speed function, this is intended
to go upstream sometime soon. But first upstream needs to get to long awaited 1.0.9 out the door. To install my (fully compatible) libusb version do:
git clone
cd libusb
git checkout usbredir
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64
make
sudo make install

~jwrdegoede

With the new libusb in place, it is time to build the non qemu parts of the usbredir code
(a standalone server, as well as the usbredir protocol parser and host libraries):
git clone
cd usbredir
make PREFIX=/usr LIBDIR=/usr/lib64
sudo make PREFIX=/usr LIBDIR=/usr/lib64 install

And now lets build qemu with usbredir support (note I enable spice + spices smartcard support here, since that is
what I use in my day to day testing, this is not strictly needed).
git clone
cd qemu
git checkout usbredir
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-smartcard-nss --enable-smartcard --enable-spice --target-list=x86_64-softmmu
make
sudo install -m0755 -p x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64 "/usr/bin"

Note do not use make install, this will also install the BIOS roms from qemu git which are outdated, this assumes that you already have a recent qemu installed and will be using the BIOS roms from that version.

Now start qemu with all the options you use normally and "-usb" or "-usb -device usb-ehci" for USB2 support. To test the network redirection, start the usbredirserver in another terminal, lets say you want to redirect a usb device with vid:pid 045e:0772, then start usbredirserver like this:
usbredirserver 045e:0772

And then in the qemu monitor cmdline type:
usb_add tcp-redir:localhost:4000

Notes:
1) replace localhost with the ip or hostname of the other machine if you're actually testing this over  the network
2) you can start multiple servers to redirect multiple devices on the same machine, add " -p 4001" to start a second server on port 4001, and make the 4000 4001 in the usb_add command
3) To unplug a device do a usb_del with the exact same arguments as you passed to the usb_add command

If you're interested in the network protocol used for the usb redirection, see:

~jwrdegoede/qemu/tree/?h=usbredir