R4.0.1: RTL8152 USB Ethernet adapter (Dell XPS13 TB16 dock) fails

[peter.p...@gmail.com]

I have a Dell TB16 dock with Ethernet over USB, based on a Realtek 8152 chip.

The device appears fine in sys-usb VM using r8152 driver and ehci/xhci. So it works fine with direct PCI access to the device.

Connecting the usb device (via 'dom0$ qvm-usb attach...') to sys-net VM triggers loading of vhci. After some dmesg says "cannot enable. Maybe the usb cable is bad?" and the device does not work in sys-net VM.

Blacklisting/disabling vhci-hcd in sys-net VM does not help (connecting fails immediately). Does qubes usb attaching require vhci?

I upgraded dom0/vm kernels, BIOS -> no help.

The dock worked fine on this computer using bare-metal Ubuntu with equal kernel version.

I would like to avoid merging sys-usb and sys-net...

Thanks for any hint.

[awokd]

peter.p...@gmail.com:

You could leave the ethernet adapter in sys-usb, and use "qvm-prefs
sys-usb provides_network true". Then you should be able to point
sys-firewall to sys-usb as needed.

[peter.p...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the tip. It leads me to the next question:

How do i tell my sys-firewall VM to use two network VMs (sys-net and sys-usb)?

Thanks!

[awokd]

peter.p...@gmail.com:

> Thanks for the tip. It leads me to the next question:
>
> How do i tell my sys-firewall VM to use two network VMs (sys-net and sys-usb)?
>
> Thanks!
>

You can't do that. You can have multiple sys-firewall equivalents
pointing to their own network VMs, and have a portion of AppVMs pointing
as desired. Otherwise, you'd have to merge at least the USB controller
handling your USB-Ethernet adapter into sys-net or your wireless
controller into sys-usb.