Parallel use of USB devices in Host and Guest

[Ralf Grenzer]

Hello all.

Parallel use of USB devices in Host and Guest.
Is this possible? I didn' found anything in the manual.

I want to use my Headset in guest and host simultaneously. For a time it worked, but since a couple of days no longer. I cannot identify an event that lead to the actual state.
I used to choose it in the audio settings in the respective system. Both systems had the device ready. Now it is either in the guest (if checked in the VB usb device setting) or on the host (if unchecked). I have to disconnect the usb devices in virtualbox, which is rather inconvenient.

I am using Arch Linux as host and Windows 10 as guest.

virtualbox 7.0.8-2
virtualbox-host-modules-arch 7.0.8-6
virtualbox-ext-oracle-7.0.8-1
virtualbox-guest-addition 7.0.8-6

[mpack]

At a hardware level (i.e. the level VirtualBox works at): no, it is not possible. USB devices are designed be plugged into a single host. They don't know anything about sharing.

But that is a classic X-Y question.

Most people assume that they need to involve guest USB when in fact they usually don't. For example USB drives can be accessed as shared folders. Or if the host is set to output audio to a headset then it should continue to do so with whatever host software you are using - which includes VirtualBox. How do you suppose output to the normal speakers works? The guest OS doesn't need to know a thing about this kind of thing.

Don't overcomplicate things by trying to give the guest ownership of things it doesn't need to own.