Re: [Qemu-discuss] Connect Qemu with physical USB hub for non-compliant device

[Tony Su]

What is this "hub" you're referring to, is it just this thing you're
describing which sounds like a special cable and adapter?

By definition, ordinarily a "hub" is a device intended to be
transparent which can support more of the same connection type, eg
enable 3 USB devices to connect to a single USB port.

By "apposite" I think you mean appropriate? AFAIK apposite implies
something "strikingly" appropriate instead of "merely" appropriate.

As for identifying the device and vendor id, have you
- Done a Google search?
- Asked the Vendor?
- Tried simply plugging it into a modern Linux system running as late
a kernel as possible? The system just might be automatically
identified. If you're running some kind of Desktop, it might be a bit
helpful in further mounting and/or configuring the device if
recognized correctly.

As a last resort(Unless you have a Windows machine sitting around then
it doesn't have to be a last resort), yes... Plugging your device into
a Windows system can work, and running a USB utility should be an easy
way to obtaqin the vendor and device ids.

HTH,
Tony

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 3:50 PM, Davide Baldini
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a healthcare glucometer device which I want to access via computer.
> The device comes with a 4-poles serial connection cable which connects to
> the device at one end and terminates in both a RS232 and an USB port on the
> other end; both the ports are meant to be connected to consumer-grade common
> computers running the apposite driver and software.
>
> The RS232 electrical specification doesn't exclude to possibly operate a
> device at USB-compatible voltages. I'd assume this device doesn't comply
> with the USB logical layer, but still it can be accessed from a computer
> running apposite drivers.
>
> I use Debian and this commercial device comes with a set of proprietary
> softwares which only work on Windows; thus, on this Debian host I'm running
> Qemu to run Windows to run the device's softwares to retrieve the database
> stored inside the device.
>
> The problem I encountered is that I'm not able to pass the USB-attached
> glucometer to Qemu's environment; the regular way to pass a generic USB
> device to Qemu is to specify the vendor_id and the product_id next to the
> '-usb' command-line option. But I don't have these parameters as 'lsusb'
> doesn't detect the glucometer as, likely, it's not USB-compliant, even if it
> can be accessed from a computer via USB.
>
> Should I try to connect the whole physical USB hub to Qemu and let the
> virtualized Windows do its tricks to access the glucometer directly, if that
> is possible? Or could there be other solutions?
>
> -- Davide
>