USB Passthrough documentation does not cover ARM64 or warn about it being AMD64 / Intel x86_64 only

[Lewiscowles1986]

Type of issue

Other (describe below)

Feedback

It's outdated, the code doesn't work, and none of the commands fail until a program, which cannot work is installed on my machine...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/connect-usb

Fails to mention that the advice provided is only for intel-compatible 64-bit processors.
I tried this on a Microsoft dev kit for ARM and it didn't work, which was surprising as none of the software said why.

I've written to the author on someone else issue with the same error:

dorssel/usbipd-win#1038

And digging through their images, I eventually found why

dorssel/usbipd-win#1023 (comment)

So why:

• the article doesn't mention is a big obvious call-out
• winget didn't tell me "Hey this won't work on your computer"
• the software itself doesn't say this...

Is just a series of cascading failures

Page URL

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/connect-usb

Content source URL

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/wsl/blob/main/WSL/connect-usb.md

Author

@craigloewen-msft

Document Id

e99de78d-d27a-664d-98ba-91116b7157c8

[Lewiscowles1986]

Ammendment, the article does have the following text, but it should be much more prominent, and ideally escalated to winget team.

A machine with an x64 processor is required. (x86 and Arm64 are currently not supported with usbipd-win).

[benedekkupper]

It's pretty comical that Microsoft promotes a third-party tool, which itself uses Windows drivers from a fourth-party (namely VirtualBox)... I don't know how complicated the driver itself is, but I really think Microsoft should be implementing this feature themselves, considering what a hurdle it is to get a Windows driver signed.

I had a similar problem with USBPCap, there is nothing standing in the way of running it on ARM64, except that the signed driver is limited to x86-64bit architectures.

[Lewiscowles1986]

@benedekkupper the installer is now fixed from the side of usbipd-win, in that it should display an error when trying to install on arm64 boxes.