Hoping to pass a USB MODEM to a VM

[jordanthompson]

TrueNAS CORE-12.0-U8
16 X 2TB drives (RAID Z2 in one pool)
* random, miscellaneous, various vendors
* all hot-swap SATA 3.0
2 X SSD (mirrored for boo pool)
Asus M5A99X EVO MB
* 32 GB RAM (4 X 8 GB)
* 1 network port on-board
* 2 network ports on PCI card (unused for now)
* 6 SATA 3.0 hot-swappable slots on-board
* 4 SATA 3.0 hot-swappable slots in one PCIe card
* 2 SATA 3.0 hot-swappable slots in another PCIe card

VM: Ubuntu desktop with 4GB RAM
Jail: Plex (very little activity)
Jail: MariaDB (not using it yet, but it is up and running)
Jail: Apache (just says hello ;-)
Jail: general purpose that will eventually run scripts via cron for various personal activities


I ran:

Code:

acpidump -t | grep DMAR

and got no results. Does this mean I won't be able to pass a MODEM through to my VM?

 

[jordanthompson]

Is it possible to pass a USB modem to an Ubuntu VM? I have searched all over and only found PCI and hard drives so far

 

[elvisimprsntr]

@jordanthompson

My understanding is that you have to pass the entire USB controller on CORE. I think it's the same situation for SCALE, at least not without a lot of hacks. Maybe TrueNAS virtualization will improve in the future, but it seems to be low priority.

If you are looking for an open source virtualization platform that supports individual device passthrough, I installed https://www.proxmox.com on a spare NAS and successfully migrated my CORE Windows VM and created several *nix VMs without much trouble. Performance is much better than bhyve, supports individual device passthrough, TPM 2.0 emulation, etc.

 

[rvassar]

You might get this to work for a simple USB device, but for anything complicated I suspect you'll have to pass the entire USB controller. I actually tried virtualizing Windows on a Linux desktop for a short period, used it for running iTunes, syncing my phone, etc... It worked until I allowed it to attempt an upgrade. The upgrade process put a bootloader on my phone that showed up as a different device that did not get passed to the VM. The result was my phone was a brick for about 2 hours until I could figure out the process, capture the temp address and get that connected to the VM. This dissuaded me from further experiments.

 

[blanchet]

On TrueNAS Core, you cannot pass a USB device to the VM, but on the other hand, you can connect a USB network device to a VM.
For example: Android smartphone in USB tethering mode works with TrueNAS Core

• connect your Android phone to the TrueNAS server with the USB cable
• enable USB modem
• a network device ue0 appears
• create a VM, and attach a NIC to ue0

 

[jordanthompson]

So the USB dongle won't work, but an Android phone will? I was hoping to be able to use the VM to send faxes when away from the house by VPN-ing through my router to the VM. Well, that's a bummer...

Any hope that this may become a future enhancement?

 

[sretalla]

Any hope that this may become a future enhancement?

Unlikely.

The way to do this is to get a PCIe add-in card with USB ports and pass that (entire card) into the VM.