USB controller passthough to VM - is iohyve the only way?

[2nd-in-charge]

We bought a nice double conversion UPSonic UPS (Cirrus Cloud series 2000VA tower model) hoping that it will work with NUT, because it uses Winpower software, and blazer-usb driver should've worked, but it didn't.

Having failed to get NUT working, we discovered that the latest Winpower software supports ssh shutdown of a remote server. So the plan was to install a linux VM running Winpower software and send shutdown signal to the host FreeNAS server. I installed Debian on the VM, installed Winpower s/w, but passing a USB or a serial port appears harder than I expected.

I'm new to bhyve and VMs in general, and have done as much forum searching as I could.

If I understand correctly:
- only entire PCI devices, not individual USB ports or serial ports can be passed through to the bhyve VM (luckily, our server has two USB controllers on the PCI bus, so we can sacrifice one of them).
- iohyve tool can create VMs, but can't see VMs created via FreeNAS GUI.

The best guide I found is using iohyve to setup and configure the VM:
https://www.ixsystems.com/community...net-pci-passthrough-under-freenas-11-2.72244/

So is iohyve the way to go, or is there a way to pass through the USB controller to a GUI VM?

And another question. Is it by any chance possible to pass a serial port to the VM? dmesg output for the serial port looks like this:

Code:

uart0: <16550 or compatible> port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on acpi0

Thank you for your help!

 

[dlavigne]

Were you able to find a solution for this?

 

[2nd-in-charge]

Hi Dru, thank you for asking.
I haven't done much since this post (been busy with my company's core activities).
So far I created pptdevs tunable for one of the USB controllers, and the ports on the other controller are still working.
I still haven't found a way to get to gui VMs from the shell, so will be going iohyve route.