https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52081
--- Comment #9 from Alois Schlögl alois.schloegl@gmail.com ---
(In reply to Zebediah Figura from comment #8)
Ah yes, my phrasing was misleading; I apologize.
I think it'll probably be more useful to debug the Kaluza software; if it's not seeing USB devices I'm not sure that Win32 vhci is going to help with that.
It might be an interesting exercise to make Win32 vhci work anyway, but I don't think it's going to provide any features that host vchi doesn't. (It won't be usable from non-Wine processes, for instance.)
I think would provide additions features - for the following reason:
I've been able to connect these USB devices on some linux host serving as USBIP server, forward those through USBIP to some windows machine, and I've been able to run the corresponding software on Windows (I'm thinking about CED1401, which is data aquisiton system with up to serveral 100kSamples/seconds., as well as the Kaluza/Sentinel dongle license) As far as I know, no vhci was running on the usbip server. The same software does not work when I connect the same USB device to the host system one which Wine is running (and it will not work through usbip, because usbip-client will no run under Wine). I guess that is because there are no linux drivers for these devices, and so it seems to me that the host-based vhci can not handle these cases. (in Kaluza and usbip I had host-vhci loaded, I can not say whether this was the case when testing ced1401).
Or let me ask you this. What would happen if you have some usb device with some windows only drivers. There are no linux drivers available for the above examples (CED1401, and Kaluza/Sentinel). Would vhci on the host being able to handle these and provide the these driver functions to Wine and applications running in Wine ? I doubt that, for the reason described above.
I guess Wine does a good job with usb devices where the drivers are somehow standardised and are supported on all OS's, like USB memory sticks, USB cameras, HID devices like keyboard and mouse, and perhaps some dongles. Some might not use vhci, for some host-based vhci might work well. But for devices that have no Linux support, and only Drivers for Windows, Wine does not seem to support these USB devices. Would you agree to that ?
When looking at this list https://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=usb&list_id=748976 I guess a number of these devices fall into that category. The hypothesis is that when vhci would be supported within Wine, it would improve support for these devices as well.