KVM: iphone passthrough to windows guest

Question

I use KVM on a ubuntu 15.04 guest and a windows 7 and windows 10 guests. I connect my iPhone to my PC and want to redirect it (using virt-manager) to the guest. I always get the error.

spice-client-error-quark: Could not redirect Apple Inc. iPhone [05ac:12a0] at 1-8: Device is in use by another application (0)

the phone is not mounted in the host system. So what else can I do?

I use virtmanager, SPICE guest tools 0.100 (that's the most current version) and my ubuntu-packages (kvm...) are up-to-date.

Answer 1

I found the solution. libimobiledevice "captures" as soon as you try to connect it to the guest system. libimobiledevice can't be uninstalled as it is a dependency of gnome, but the package libimobiledevice-utils can be removed. This disables any interaction (even mounting) of the ubuntu host with iPhones but enables the redirection to the windows guest

Answer 2

This may be a solution, depending on what you were attempting to accomplish in the guest OS.

My host OS is Linux Mint 19 Tara running the MATE desktop. I run Windows 10 Pro in my guest OS, and I was attempting to reset an iPad using recovery mode and iTunes.

I was able to use libimobiledevice-util's ideviceenterrecovery program to put the device in recovery mode (shows USB cable and arrow pointing to iTunes logon on iPad). Then I was then able to pass the device through to the guest OS using Virtual Machine Manager without the symptom that you described (and that I too was getting originally).