usb-host is not a valid device name - error when trying to pass USB to Qemu

Question

I have tried to use various variations of adding a usb device to my Windows VM but to no avail.

I have a Yocto project derived Wind River Linux, withQemu-kvm` installed. The guest OS is Windows 10.

I do a lsusb and get -

Bus 001 Device 029: ID 8564:1000 Transcend JetFlash 

When I try and pass a USB-Device, plugged in to the host system, to the VM, by doing a

 -usb -device qemu-xhci,id=xhci -device usb-host,bus=xhci.0,hostbus=1,hostaddr=29

I get an error saying -

qemu-system-x86_64: -device usb-host,bus=xhci.0,hostbus=1,hostaddr=29 : 'usb-host' is not a valid device model name.

If I try and use -device usb-storage, it expects another input called 'driver' which I am not aware of.

I tried doing aqemu-system-x86_64 -device help|&greo usb.*hci, which gave the following output -

name "ich9-usb-echi1", bus PCI
name "ich9-usb-echi2", bus PCI
name "ich9-usb-echi1", bus PCI
name "ich9-usb-echi2", bus PCI
name "ich9-usb-echi3", bus PCI
name "ich9-usb-echi4", bus PCI
name "ich9-usb-echi5", bus PCI
name "ich9-usb-echi6", bus PCI
name "nec-usb-xhci", bus PCI
name "piix3-usb-uhci", bus PIC
name "piix4-usb-uhci", bus PIC
name "usb-ehci", bus PCI

Not sure what needs to be done to get this USB disk recognized in Windows VM, or which device type and parameters need to be passed. I tried with usb-ehci as well...

Answer 1

If it is compiled from github source code and install qemu.

usb-host default not support.

You necessary on qemu configure add the --enable-libusb argument and then install the libusb package. Then reinstall qemu.
usb-host will work!

Information can be acquired at bugs.launchpad.net.

//Fixed a typo above.

Answer 2

I've had this exact problem, for me it was caused by running sudo pacman -Syu.

After this all my VMs with USB passthrough would fail on boot and the log files would tell me the following:

qemu-system-x86_64: -device {"driver":"usb-host","hostbus":1,"hostaddr":7,"id":"hostdev2","bus":"usb.0","port":"1"}: 'usb-host' is not a valid device model name

I realized that after running updates qemu-hw-usb-host was missing, what I did to get it back and working was to reinstall libusb but also sudo pacman -S qemu-hw-usb-host

I truly hope this will save anyone with the same problem some time and troubles.