How to deal with passthrough of all USB except Flash?

[TreyH]

I’ve managed up till now passing through all my USB ports via IOMMU groups except the one the boot flash was plugged into. But adding a new device has scrambled this, and I don’t know how to proceed.

 

I’ve been operating fairly happily for four months now with Unraid as my home NAS and as the hypervisor for my Win 10 gaming/dev machine. Few problems, none on the Unraid side, just on the Windows side.

 

But getting it set up right required

1. Putting my boot flash on a USB-A → USB-C adapter and plugging it into my mobo’s lone USB-C port
2. Passing through all the USB busses except for the USB-C one.

 

This meant I couldn’t use USB-C devices in Windows, but that wasn’t a big deal. The alternatives were to only passthrough two USB 2 or three USB 2.1 ports plus a USB-C port, and that just wasn’t sufficient for my Windows installation.

 

I’ve now run into a more difficult issue.

 

I have an Intel WiFi/Bluetooth PCI card that has a USB header—basically, the WiFi goes through PCI but the Bluetooth goes through the USB (though it can’t be powered via USB, so the card has to sit in a PCI slot even if you aren’t using it for WiFi). This was weird, but fine—the USB bus that saw the Bluetooth adapter was one of the ones I was already passing through.

 

But, I needed to move the card to a different PCI slot to accommodate a new SATA HBA since I was adding a couple new disks to my pools—the Intel wireless card was in a full-width slot even though it was just an x1 card.

 

Unfortunately, when I moved the card to the free x1 slot, the Bluetooth’s USB device moved, too—to the same bus the USB-C port is on. I don’t understand this—I’d think that the header would determine the bus, not the PCI slot, but I don’t really understand how this odd hybrid PCI/USB card works.

 

I’d already broken up the IOMMU groups as much as possible before finding my only choice for the boot flash was the USB-C port.

 

So what now? Are either buying a Bluetooth card that doesn’t require USB, or else an actual Bluetooth USB dongle I can plug into (a hub attached to) one of the currently passed-through buses, my only options (other than not using the new HBA)?

Edited June 5, 2021 by TreyH
Clarification