Intermittent USB device issues and crashing

[stags]

I have an issue where a smart card reader device will repeatedly connect and disconnect from the Windows 10 VM. There are some days where it works with absolutely no issues whatsoever, some days where it randomly will not work part of the time, and other days where it repeatedly attempts to connect only to crash my VM. I have attached logs showing a case where it repeatedly tried to connect and then crashed my VM. This does the same thing with my Windows 7 VM using another USB printer device.

The smart card reader previously worked on an older version of Virtual Box running a Windows 7 VM. I have also confirmed that the smart card reader works perfectly running directly on the host machine. The host machine OS and hardware is unchanged from previous.

I have tried rolling back to previous version of Virtual Box, uninstalling and reinstalling Virtual box, updated all drivers and hardware on the host machine, uninstalling and reinstalling the host USB drivers, and using different USB ports.

Again, please note that using an older version of Virtual box with a Windows 7 VM with the exact same smart card reader and host machine, there were no issues. This occurred when I upgraded to the latest version of Virtual box and started using a Windows 10 VM.

[stags]

I believe this issue may be caused by an HID Omnikey 3121 smart card reader. Is there a way to determine this from the log file? I would like to know how I can use this device without it crashing my VM.

I had previously used this device using VirtualBox 5.x.x with a Windows 7 VM. What could have changed?

[scottgus1]

Your Virtualbox and Extension Pack versions match, good!

00:00:03.012283 VirtualBox VM 6.0.8 r130520 win.amd64 (May 13 2019 14:14:44) release log
00:00:03.125676 Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack (Version: 6.0.8 r130520; VRDE Module: VBoxVRDP)

Once you attach your device:

00:26:05.400000 VUSB: Attached '00000000054fca40[proxy 076b:3031]' to port 2 on RootHub#1 (FullSpeed)

I see lots of:

00:26:06.306336 OHCI#0: Raising unrecoverable error
00:26:06.306688 OHCI: Software reset
00:26:06.308863 OHCI: USB Operational
......
00:26:10.753589 OHCI: Software reset
00:26:10.754090 OHCI: USB Operational
......

There's a few attempts to detach and re-attach the device, surrounded by the software reset and USB operational messages, then:

00:33:45.458733
00:33:45.458734 !!! rtR3WinUnhandledXcptFilter caught an exception on thread 0000000000003774!!!
00:33:45.458753

Can you attach any other USB devices to this guest on this host successfully, like a USB thumb drive?

[mpack]

OHCI is USB1. Surely the smart card isn't so ancient that it falls back to USB1? It may however indicate that the host can't read from the card, including not being able to identify the USB level. I.e. a faulty card.

p.s. One (relevant) log file please. We don't need the log plus 3 backups plus the hardening log. That just wastes server space.

p.p.s. The easiest way to access a USB storage device is as a shared folder. There's no need to assign ownership at a USB level unless it's necessary, e.g. if the storage uses a filesystem not supported by the host OS.

[stags]

Let me try and address all of your questions:

1 - I have not experienced this issue with other USB devices, admittedly I have not tried with anything more than a keyboard, mouse, and thumb drive
2 - The USB card reader is USB 2
3 - Noted for future log submissions
4 - This is not a USB storage device; it is a smart card reader. I did not believe there was a way to have this device recognized and usable to the VM unless I mounted it. If there is another way to do this, please let me know.

Since my last post, I have simply not used this device and have not experienced a single crash. Based off what you are telling me and what I have seen, this particular device seems to be the problem. Is there any way around this?

[scottgus1]

Could be possible the device is no good anymore. 'Sometimes it works OK, sometimes it goes south' probably means there's an intermittent problem with the device itself. Though it's a USB2 device, it wants to attach as USB 1 in the log. Glitchy maybe...

Will it work with a physical Windows 10 PC?

Since it is a smart card reader, not a USB storage device, you would need to mount it with the USB filter.

Only other idea I could suggest is to enable USB 3 in the guest. The Virtualbox USB 3 implementation is backwards-compatible with 1 & 2, and is supposed to be much better than the old USB 1 & 2 OHCI/EHCI stack.

[stags]

Could be possible the device is no good anymore. 'Sometimes it works OK, sometimes it goes south' probably means there's an intermittent problem with the device itself. Though it's a USB2 device, it wants to attach as USB 1 in the log. Glitchy maybe...

The device has been rock solid outside the VM environment and on Windows 7 VMs, so I would rule that out.

Will it work with a physical Windows 10 PC?

Yes

Since it is a smart card reader, not a USB storage device, you would need to mount it with the USB filter.

I have already done this, and it works with Windows 7 VMs

Only other idea I could suggest is to enable USB 3 in the guest. The Virtualbox USB 3 implementation is backwards-compatible with 1 & 2, and is supposed to be much better than the old USB 1 & 2 OHCI/EHCI stack.

I am going to give this a try and see what happens after I have had time to test.