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For the USB part, would adding a extra USB adaptor card (assuming it's a desktop machine) and using PCI-passthrough/VFIO on that adaptor make it easier? From my knowledge of QEMU, then no USB emulation is involved - the guest OS sees the entire USB adaptor (and the host doesn't) - so one can have all the special USB hardware connected to that.

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I'm not knowledgeable with this, but I think so, as it'd be a standard passthrough.

What needs to be kept in mind is that, as the standanrd passthrough, it's subject to the IOMMU groups handling (in best case, there's no other device in the same group; otherwise, one needs some trickery, which AFAIK is not 100% guaranteed to work).

I've read of people doing this setup for exactly this on homelab and VFIO subreddits. PCIe passthrough is easier. I've no personal experience with this, but it seems to work well; the VFIO setups are hardcore anyways.

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