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USB Devices Are Not Available on Some Linux hosts, the VM > Removable Devices > USB Devices Menu Is Empty

Details

Some recently released Linux distributions are not mounting USBFS to /proc/bus/usb.  The virtual machine's USB back end uses this to detect USB devices that are attached to the host. 

Solution

To work around this issue, mount USBFS to /proc/bus/usb.

To do this while the host  is running, execute the following command as root:

mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb
 
You need to power cycle the virtual machines after the mount command to have access to available USB devices.

To configure the host to mount USBFS automatically on bootup, add the  following line in the /etc/fstab file:

usbfs  /proc/bus/usb  usbfs  auto  0  0
 
If this line is already present in /etc/fstab, it likely has the noauto option set in the options column (4th column). Change this to auto.

Some of the Linux distributions that are known not to mount USBFS by default include:

  • Ubuntu Linux 6.06
  • SUSE Linux 10.1
  • SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10
  • Mandriva Linux 2006
  • SLES9 SP3 64 bit

Note: This issue affects these operating systems only when they are used as a host for VMware virtual machines.  These operating systems, when used as guests, do not exhibit this problem.

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Actions
  • KB Article: 3862823
  • Updated: Aug 14, 2009
  • Products:
    VMware GSX Server
    VMware Server
    VMware Workstation
  • Product Versions:
    VMware GSX Server 3.x (Linux)
    VMware Server 1.0.x (Linux)