Host USB UART port from VM

[usbpass]

Hello,
I have a USB UART adapter plugged in the host and appearing as /dev/ttyUSB0.

Can I access that port with a serial terminal from the virtual instance?

At the moment I am testing this on a Ubuntu host but I would like to use that from a Mac host (if that matters).

Thanks for your help.
Best

[luisp]

Hey!

One option is to passthrough the USB port. This is easy to do with libvirt in Linux, as described here. Then, using the libvirt interface (I’d personally use virt-manager) pass the USB port directly to the instance.

On the other hand, you will lose access to the USB adapter on the host; I’m not sure if this is what you intend.

HTH!

[saviq]

Hi @usbpass, on macOS you could achieve the same with the VirtualBox backend:

Instructions for enabling & disabling VirtualBox support on Windows and MacOS

Note: This document is deprecated in favor enabling VirtualBox support on Windows and macOS (Intel only) We added support for VirtualBox, primarily to lower the requirements of Multipass on Windows. Now anywhere VirtualBox runs, Multipass will, too. It’s a separate environment so your instances from Hyper-V or HyperKit (the default backends on Windows and macOS, respectively) will not move over, but you can switch between the backends freely. To enable the preview VirtualBox support, follow…

We don’t currently expose that functionality within Multipass itself.