[Solved] Guest driver for the xHCI USB 3 controller

[s1L3nCe]

To hide, edit your post and remove images.
To make smaller, save image on PC, open some painter and strstch it to 50% size and reupload here, by editing your post.

I would recommend to isolate the problem: disable the first USB controller in host BIOS, and see how first works. Then enable the first one and disable the second USB controller.

Don't troll me please I know how to use paint. I've used other forums where you can hide and unfold pictures or making them smaller with a simple command. I was wondering if I could do that in this forum so I asked. Anyway... I edited them

Will try isolating the issue.

OK, this is definitely not related to the original topic...

But here's one odd thing I noticed. Under "PCI devices" there's an "Intel Wildcat Point PCH - USB 3.0 xHCI Host Controller" but under "USB devices" there's only an "ASMedia XHCI 1.0 Controller", no sign of an Intel xHCI HC. Any idea why?

No idea but I think the problem might be related to this finding.


----- EDIT ----

Tried ALL ports. I even connected a usb 2.0 front panel (card reader) to one of the internal USB2.0 connectors. Non of them work in the guest machine.

Again, I suspect that the motherboard USB controllers are not compatible with vbox. Will test vmware to see if there is any difference but I hope this get fixed because I love vbox :_(

PS: I might end up buying a usb pciex card with usb 2 ports... I have a PCI one but this board has no PCI


-------- LAST EDIT -----------

Good and bad news. I have a PCIex USB3 controller (Rensas Electronics) so I decided to give it a try one more time:

- The good news is that the Rensas controller works perfect on the guest machine. My usb pendrives work excelent, both usb 2 and usb 3. And the performance is exactly the same as in the host computer. And I was able to install the drivers posted at #1 normaly, just by executing the setup.exe
- The bad news is what you already know; I cannot figure a way to make vbox work with the built in USB ports (none of them). I'm going to contact ASUS and make them aware of this issue. They might be able to help.

Thanks a lot to everyone on the thread for your time and interest. And sorry that the thread went a little bit off course

[Rootman]

Been a while and I thought I'd report back.

On my first laptop I had issues with the VM reading my removable USB thumb drives. It would show installing it in the host and never show up in the VM, switch back to USB 2.0 and it was there. Looks like the 2nd beta fixed this.

I also installed beta 2 on a second laptop with USB 2 ports. I enabled the USB 3.0 device in the host settings and fired up my Win 7 32 bit guest. I installed the same drivers I pointed to in my original post. Installed without issue and the devices work properly, USB HDDs and thumb drives both.

Curious, it may be just my imagination, or the quality of the second beta but it seems that I have a lot better throughput on the USB devices on the guest now for my 2nd laptop, despite the fact that the host has only USB 2.0 ports. Things pop up a lot faster and it seems to discover the drives a faster too.

[michaln]

Curious, it may be just my imagination, or the quality of the second beta but it seems that I have a lot better throughput on the USB devices on the guest now for my 2nd laptop, despite the fact that the host has only USB 2.0 ports. Things pop up a lot faster and it seems to discover the drives a faster too.

If the VM is configured identically then no, it's probably not going to be any faster. If the VM is set up with xHCI emulation then yes, USB should be faster even if the host only has USB 2.0 controllers. Although xHCI is more complex than the older USB host controllers, it is much more virtualization-friendly and doesn't have nearly as much emulation overhead as the EHCI/OHCI.

I should add that the same is true on the host side... a high-speed USB 2.0 device will be slightly faster when plugged into a xHCI-managed port vs. when plugged into an EHCI port. The difference isn't dramatic but measurable.