Redirect laptop keyboard and mouse to VM?

[summersab]

Several years back, I saw a fun post where a guy managed to set up ESXi, install a VM, set up passthrough for his video card and a USB port to the guest, and use the setup like a client hypervisor. From his description, he claimed it actually worked rather well. I have a really beastly laptop, and I've managed to get everything working except for one little detail: the mouse and keyboard. I don't see a way to enable passthrough for those, and I would be stuck using an external USB mouse and keyboard. Now, I know that what I'm suggesting would be completely unsupported, but is there some way to pass these devices through to a guest? There has to be, I would think, especially if the guest VM is a Linux distro. Is there an undocumented way to manually passthrough other devices that aren't listed by ESXi? Is there a way to perhaps tunnel /dev/tty over SSH? Who's feeling creative?

[Davoud Teimouri]

You can't Pass-Through any devices because the device should be compatible with that.

If your device is not listed in the pass-through devices, so it's incompatible and you can't do that.

About external mouse and keyboard, the user pass-through USB ports to the machine actually.

[summersab]

I don't currently have ESXi installed and running on my system, so I can't check, but do you know if it is possible to pass through the ISA bridge/LPC controller? After doing a bit of reading, it seems like that's the bus that handles built-in keyboards and touchpads. If I can enable passthrough for this device to a VM, it should work . . .

[summersab]

I plopped ESXi on a USB drive and fired it up. The answer: nope. The LPC controller is not capable of running in passthrough mode.

Back to Qubes. I HATE Xen. One of these days, I tell you, I shall have my bare-metal VMware client hypervisor . . . (shakes fist at the sky defiantly).