Passing Broadcom 5880 smart card reader to windows guest

[callegar]

Hi,

does anybody know if it is possible to pass the broadcom 5880 (USH) smartcard reader to a windows guest under virtualbox?
The device appears as a usb device and is incorporated in newer dell laptops.

All other usb smartcard readers could be passed to the windows guest and used to work with virtualbox, but this one gives me a strange behavior:

1) When the device is connected it says it is a compound device. It incorporates both the smart card reader (which I care about) and a so called "control vault" (I do not even know what it is).

2) When the drivers are installed, windows indicates the two things as working, but...

- USB activity indication goes up like crazy in virtualbox (indicator flashing all the time)
- windows applications report that no smart card reader is available.

Can this be an issue with virtualbox management of this usb device?

[robm]

I have Dell Latitude E6400 and I have not even been successful installing the Dell drivers on Vista while within VirtualBox. I suspect that the Dell installer is checking to see if it's installing on Dell hardware. I'm going to try to install Vista to a real partition on my hard disk and installing the Dell drivers on that partition, then copying just the Broadcom 5880 driver over to the VirtualBox install.

Even without drivers installed, I do see the USB activity going crazy, both in XP and Vista virtual machines.

[robm]

UPDATE: installed Vista on a partition and installed the Dell drivers and copied the drivers from C:/Program Files/Broadcom Corporation/Broadcom USH Host Components to the virtual machine.

Inside VirtualBox, the drivers did install and the device manager reported that the device was functioning normally. But, the red activity light for USB still goes crazy, and the smart card middleware doesn't see the card reader.

[gregdavisfromnj]

I had this same issue, never resolved it. See, http://en.community.dell.com/support-fo ... 29716.aspx. What is wacky is that the fingerprint reader and smartcard reader seem to be tied together somehow internally, like it is the same chip from broadcom. Probably saved Dell money to have 1 less chip on the motherboard. But, there seems to be some extra paranoid security going on here where the "vault" needs to initialize, before userspace things can access the cardreader or fingerprint reader. That might have something to do with TPM and the fact that the guest OS was not a Dell provided OS, and so the trust might not have been established.

[lollul]

Broadcom 5880 still doesn't work on Virtualbox 4.0.0.
Works fine though on vmware.
(host ubuntu 64bit, guest XP 32bit)

[virtuoso]

Any idea why this still doesn't work? I have the same problems with W7 32-bit running in a VB on W7 64-bit host. Broadcom USH is not recognized w.r.t. the CAC reader. ActivCard USB CAC reader works just fine.

After installing Dell ControlVault software, the Broadcom chip drivers are installed but I get this error in the Device Manager: "This device cannot start. (Code 10)"