Passthrough USB Host Keyboard doesn't work on Q35 platform on boot-up

[Colin Finck]

Using qemu-kvm as shipped with Ubuntu 16.04, I cannot get a passed-through USB Host Keyboard to work at boot-up using the Q35 platform.

My minimal example to verify this bug is the following:

  qemu-system-x86_64 -M q35 -m 128 -cdrom mini.iso -usb -usbdevice host:04ca:005a -vnc :1 -display none

Using a noname USB Keyboard with ID 04ca:005a and the Ubuntu 16.04 NetBoot mini.iso, I can see the boot screen of the Ubuntu ISO through VNC, but pressing the arrow keys doesn't do anything.

By taking out the "-M q35" parameter, QEMU switches to the traditional i440FX system. The passed-through USB Host Keyboard works there, but the old platform is no option for me.

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

Have you tried whether it works with the latest upstream version of QEMU (currently version 2.9) - since you've marked this as upstream QEMU problem, too?

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Thanks Thomas, definitely worth to check.
@Colin - if you want a quick and easy short with qemu 2.8 you can try [1].

[1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OpenStack/CloudArchive

[Colin Finck (colinfinck)]

Same problem with qemu 2.8 from Ubuntu Cloud Archive.
Is that enough to consider the bug highly likely in latest upstream version too? I don't have a QEMU build system at hand right now..

[Colin Finck (colinfinck)]

Doesn't happen when adding another UHCI controller and explicitly connecting the keyboard to it, like: -device vt82c686b-usb-uhci,id=myusb -device usb-host,bus=myusb.0,hostbus=3,hostaddr=2

Is QEMU just incorrectly connecting my full-speed USB keyboard to USB 2.0 EHCI instead of USB 1.x UHCI?
Or is SeaBIOS lacking support for anything involving USB 2.0 controllers, even simple HID devices?

[Russell Morris (6-u3untu-h)]

Hi,

Seeing this same thing! And I'm on Ubuntu 20.10, so pretty current :-). vt82c686b-usb-uhci doesn't seem to be accessible any more, but trying qemu-xhci => no joy, still have to reset the VM after each startup, to get the keyboard and mouse working.

Is this expected?

Thanks!

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

This is an automated cleanup. This bug report has been moved to QEMU's
new bug tracker on gitlab.com and thus gets marked as 'expired' now.
Please continue with the discussion here:

 https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/144