Having an issue with virt-manager not allowing USB passthrough

[redsbaron]

Hello,

for some reason I get the following error when trying to pass through any USB device in virt-manager.

[malcolmlewis]

@redsbaron no issues here, could be related to the virtiofsd issue, did you try to force the install of this package?

[redsbaron]

Yes, I deleted the folder and reinstalled the package

and i try this

sudo rm -rf /usr/libexec/virtiofsd

[malcolmlewis]

@redsbaron try a zypper rm virtiofsd and then whatever is removed, re-install.

[redsbaron]

I rebooted and unfortunately it still doesn’t work

[OrsoBruno]

Looks somewhat similar to
https://forums.opensuse.org/t/usb-grayed-out-cant-add-usb-devices-in-virtualbox/172220/62
but that was fixed by the recent update to systemd…

[redsbaron]

I updated TW, I don’t think this is the problem

[pavinjoseph]

Add your user (pavin in my case) to the requisite groups and reboot:

sudo usermod -a -G libvirt,qemu,kvm pavin
systemctl reboot

[redsbaron]

Problem solved thank you, but why don’t work out of the box?

[pavinjoseph]

Possibly due to some security concerns. By default a normal user would need to get elevated privileges to connect to the qemu socket (for example when opening virt-manager) and perform other tasks but the Python helper script that does the USB passthrough is not part of the process that got the elevated privileges when opening virt-manager. Hence the issue, not really a problem exclusive to OpenSuse as I had the same in Debian too.

A bug report or PR to the virt-manager project to get the helper script to request elevated privileges might be an option, but it also could be annoying to ask the user password every time a new USB device is connected.