Xen pvUSB Front-End Driver Coming For Linux 5.17

After being more than ten years in the making after being started by Fujitsu engineers in 2008 but never going through all the steps for upstreaming, thanks to a SUSE engineer the Linux 5.17 kernel will finally have the Xen USB virtual host driver.

Juergen Gross of SUSE recently has been cleaning up, updating, and getting the Xen pvUSB Linux front-end driver in a state for upstream. Earlier this week the goal was realized when Greg Kroah-Hartman pulled this driver into the USB subsystem tree he maintains ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.17 merge window.

This is about USB device support for Xen para-virtualized use. This driver enables guest systems to access USB devices passed through from the Dom0 for enabling generic USB device access. This Xen pvUSB driver has been tested across various devices up through USB 3.0 connectivity.

The ~2k lines of new code for this Xen USB driver is now ready for landing with Linux 5.17.