Hyper-v does not provide USB passthrough, some people use USB redirection from remote desktop RDP… A similar technology might be USB over network, but this does not always work, as many USB devices have very little tolerance for lag ! and this will introduce some lag !
My objective is to connect a MINI-VCI connected on a raspberry PI to a computer running other software to analyze the data, whether this works or not is yet to be seen.
There seems to be a few solutions online, some using generic hardware, and some using specialty hardware
The most diverse of those solutions that can work on everything from a raspberry pi to a windows computer and android phone is (https://www.virtualhere.com/), but I have not yet verified whether this software is USB/IP compatible or not
USB/IP has been built into the linux kernel for some time now, and a couple of solutions for both server and client are available on github, So here I will be investigating what I can do to bridge the Linux Raspberry PI to my windows PC,
USBIP is a protocol where the server is the machine connected to the USB device via wire, and the client is the machine that needs to use the USB device but is not connected to it via USB.
In linux, usbipd is the name of the server, and usbip being the client, In debian, both server and client are included in the usbip package, hence, on the raspberry PI and on the Linux server, we need to run the command
apt-get install usbip
The modules of USB/IP (usbip-core, usb-host, and vhci-hcd) are already included,
We will get to the Windows client after the Linux to Linux section
The two options
In the cases we are exploring here, the server is a Raspberry Pi (3), the client is a Windows machine, but there are a couple of things to try first, the Windows clients are KVM virtual machines, we will try
1- The client is the Linux Host machine hosting the windows virtual machines, and the USB port is passed to the virtual machine
OR
2- The Windows client has the USBIP driver directly connecting to the Raspberry PI server
The Steps
Installing the USB/IP server on the raspberry pi “apt-get install usbip”