How to have USB 3.0 capability for a Windows-7 VM on a host based on the AMD Ryzen 7 4700 processor

[milverton]

Has anyone found a way to add USB 3.0 capability to a guest VM running Windows-7 Professional (64-bit) SP1 on a machine with an AMD Ryzen 7 4700 processor?

The full name of the processor, per the Windows 7 Professional Control Panel's System page, is "AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with Radeon graphics". (The machine is an HP Envy x360.) (The host is Linux with 5.13.0-51-generic kernel, running Ubuntu 20.04; and itself has no problem with USB 3.0.)

With an Intel processor I think this would be no problem - in fact it is not even an issue on a real pc built to run Windows 7.

The advised solution in Device Manager is to visit the manufacturer's web page to get the driver(s) needed, but AMD seems to be no help here for Windows versions prior to Windows 10 which use this processor or one similar to it.

I have puzzled over: (1) whether this is a genuine Virtualbox topic, but I think it must be, since it would not arise without the capabilities only a virtual machine environment presents; (2) which of the various forum topic groupings is the right one.

[mpack]

I don't think the Ryzen processor is relevant. What is relevant is that Win7 had no native support for xhci (a.k.a. USB3), you have to install the Intel drivers.

See USB Basics and Troubleshooting:Guest Support.

[milverton]

Wow - that was quick - and it worked! Thank you, mpack.

(A post by socratis of 11. Apr 2017 had the solution, with the update inside it of 2019-11-20 referring to the Archive.org site)

[milverton]

A quick afterthought - a kind of "after the class ends" question: I can't see that I ever downloaded this on the real pc built to run Windows 7, so does that suggest it would have been "slipstreamed" into the manufacturer's installation media but is missing from the iso download I used for the VM installation?

[mpack]

If the PC had USB3 ports and was shipped with Win7 then yes, the vendor will have made sure that the installed image and recovery DVDs included xhci drivers, just like they included drivers for the DVD drive and other non-generic hardware of the time.