Google Coral passtrough to VM

[Sjoerd]

Hello community,

I'm using TrueNAS Scale with some virtual machines. One of my virtual machines is running Frigate.
I bought a Google Coral TPU Accelerator for object recognition, but when I try to add the USB device to the VM, it doesn't show up there.

When I run `dmesg | grep -i usb` before and after connecting, I can see that the device is connected:

```
[ 1224.895091] usb 1-7: new high-speed USB device number 9 using xhci_hcd
[ 1225.047832] usb 1-7: New USB device found, idVendor=1a6e, idProduct=089a, bcdDevice= 1.00
[ 1225.047849] usb 1-7: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0
```

Why doesn't it show up and how can I add the Coral to the VM?

 

[brahmy]

Funny, I'm also looking at this exact issue this week.

The only way I've found to make this work is passing an entire USB controller with the PCI passthrough. Can't figure out how to make it work with just USB. The problem is that TN Scale doesn't have the drivers to recognize the device.

There is a thread about manually installing the drivers on TN Scale, but a) it's not recommended and b) for what it's worth, I couldn't get it to work with USB.

There's a poster in there using TrueCharts/Frigate who was able to make it work by passing a raw USB device i.e. /dev/bus/usb/002/005 but that doesn't work with TN Scale VMs, as far as I can figure out.

Anyway, subscribing to this post in case someone else has a solution...

Edit: More details. The only other PCI USB bus I have is integrated into my NVIDIA GPU, so I am passing the Coral TPU to the VM & Frigate docker container via that. However, I am running into a weird error on hardware acceleration and I wonder if it's because I'm trying to use the video card for its GPU and its USB bus. I don't know... I am just a guy that hacks things together!!

 

[morganL]

Funny, I'm also looking at this exact issue this week.

The only way I've found to make this work is passing an entire USB controller with the PCI passthrough. Can't figure out how to make it work with just USB. The problem is that TN Scale doesn't have the drivers to recognize the device.

There is a thread about manually installing the drivers on TN Scale, but a) it's not recommended and b) for what it's worth, I couldn't get it to work with USB.

There's a poster in there using TrueCharts/Frigate who was able to make it work by passing a raw USB device i.e. /dev/bus/usb/002/005 but that doesn't work with TN Scale VMs, as far as I can figure out.

Anyway, subscribing to this post in case someone else has a solution...

Edit: More details. The only other PCI USB bus I have is integrated into my NVIDIA GPU, so I am passing the Coral TPU to the VM & Frigate docker container via that. However, I am running into a weird error on hardware acceleration and I wonder if it's because I'm trying to use the video card for its GPU and its USB bus. I don't know... I am just a guy that hacks things together!!

Yes, I'd recommend passing through the whole USB controller as a pcie device.

 

[Sjoerd]

My USB controller does not show up in the PCI Passtrough menu
How can I pass the entire controller to the VM?

 

[morganL]

My USB controller does not show up in the PCI Passtrough menu
How can I pass the entire controller to the VM?

View attachment 68740

Is it a separate PCIe card.. or built into the motherboard?

 

[Sjoerd]

Is it a separate PCIe card.. or built into the motherboard?

It's built into the mobo

 

[Sjoerd]

lsusb does show the Coral (18d1:9302), but it's still not in the usb dropdown.
Specify custom with "0x18d1 / 0x9302" does not work

 

[Sjoerd]

I solved it. How?

`lspci | grep USB` > found my USB controller, pass it through to the VM (PCIe passthrough, in my case it was
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Device 43ed (rev 11))

Now all my usb devices are listed in the VM.

 

[gerjo]

My coral just arrived. I was prepared for days of debugging, alas it is much easier than that! Frigate (0.12.1_1.1.4) from the TrueNAS catalog has a checkbox under "Mount USB Bus", from thereon it worked automatically, no drivers loaded.

Screenshot shows in detail where this checkbox is located.