Introduction

USB/IP is a USB sharing project (http://usbip.sourceforge.net/) aimed to allow the access of remote USB devices over the network. This way you can expose your USB devices to another computer like if they were connected to it as depicted in the following diagram.

Installing USB/IP

The USB/IP package is deprecated since kernel 3.17 and it has been added to the mainline (see http://usbip.sourceforge.net/#download ), so you need to uninstall any current packages and install it from the kernel support as follows:

sudo apt-get remove --purge usbip* libusbip*

Then install linux-tools

sudo apt-get install linux-tools-generic

With this you will have everything you need to use USB/IP.

Using USB/IP

Server side setup

The server is the one that has the real USB device physically attached to it.

1. Load the USBPIP kernel driver:

sudo modprobe usbip_host

2. Start the USB/IP daemon:

sudo /usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbipd &

3. List all the devices connected:

/usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbip list -l

In my case it lists:

$ /usr/lib/linux-tools/4.2.0-16-generic/usbip list -l
 - busid 1-10 (04f2:b446)
   Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd : unknown product (04f2:b446)

 - busid 1-2.2 (045e:071d)
   Microsoft Corp. : unknown product (045e:071d)

 - busid 1-2.4 (046d:c52b)
   Logitech, Inc. : Unifying Receiver (046d:c52b)

 - busid 1-3 (0458:706e)
   KYE Systems Corp. (Mouse Systems) : unknown product (0458:706e)

4. Select the device you want to share and bind it with the following command:

sudo /usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbip bind -b <device ID>

In my case I want to share my Webcam which is the device with bus ID 1-3:

sudo /usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbip bind -b <Device bus ID>

Now the device is ready to be accesed from a client computer!

Client side setup

Let's try to access our webcam from another computer on the same network.

1. Mount the VHCI driver:

sudo modprobe vhci-hcd

2. List all devices available from the server:

/usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbip list -r <Server IP address>

In my case:

SERVER_IP=10.251.101.16
/usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbip list -r $SERVER_IP
$ /usr/lib/linux-tools/4.4.0-83-generic/usbip list -r 10.251.101.16
Exportable USB devices
======================
 - 10.251.101.16
        1-3: KYE Systems Corp. (Mouse Systems) : unknown product (0458:706e)
           : /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-3
           : Miscellaneous Device / ? / Interface Association (ef/02/01)

3. Let's attach to the selected device:

sudo /usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbip attach -r <server IP address> -b <Device bus ID>

In my case I only have one device:

sudo /usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbip attach -r 10.251.101.16 -b 1-3

Now you should have your device exposed on your client computer as if it was connected to it. You can now simply use it as usual e.g:

gst-launch v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! fakesink -v

Disconnect the devices

In order to disconnect the devices you must firt detach from your client:

1. List all devices attached:

sudo /usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbip port

2. Detach the corresponding port:

sudo /usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbip detach -p 00

Then we just unbind the device from our server:

3. Unbind device on server side:

sudo /usr/lib/linux-tools/$(uname -r)/usbip unbind -b 1-3