Additional USB controller not possible with Asrock J5005? [PARTIALLY SOLVED]

[CS01-HS]

My motherboard is an Asrock J5005 .

It has one PCIe slot where I have my HBA.

 

I'm running the "macinabox" OS X VM and I'd like to pass my iPhone through to it to sync with iTunes.

I tried passing it as a device but couldn't get it "seen" consistently or syncing at all.

 

The recommended solution is to pass the whole controller but I can't do that because my board only has one (which hosts the unRAID boot USB, see 00.15.0)

root@NAS:~# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Gemini Lake Host Bridge (rev 03)
00:00.1 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework Processor Participant (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation UHD Graphics 605 (rev 03)
00:0e.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 3198 (rev 03)
00:0f.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor Trusted Execution Engine Interface (rev 03)
00:12.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Device 31e3 (rev 03)
00:13.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Gemini Lake PCI Express Root Port (rev f3)
00:13.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Gemini Lake PCI Express Root Port (rev f3)
00:13.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Gemini Lake PCI Express Root Port (rev f3)
00:13.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Gemini Lake PCI Express Root Port (rev f3)
00:15.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Device 31a8 (rev 03)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 31e8 (rev 03)
00:1f.1 SMBus: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor Gaussian Mixture Model (rev 03)
01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Broadcom / LSI SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 03)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
04:00.0 SATA controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1062 Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)

 

So I tried to add another controller, thinking I could pass that.

The only free slot on my board is an M.2 (Key E) slot.

 

First I tried this M.2 NGFF Key A-E to Dual USB2.0 Extension Cable Card 

which worked! but it's a hub not a controller so it didn't solve the problem.

 

Next I searched for an M.2 USB controller but couldn't find any so I tried a workaround:

an M.2 to mini PCIe adapter paired with a mini PCIe USB controller.

M.2 (NGFF) Key A/E/A+E to Mini PCI-E Adapter 

Mini PCI-E to USB3.0 Expansion Card

 

I have this installed now but it's not recognized. The ports get power but the output of lscpi and lsusb (with a USB device attached) before and after installation are the same.

 

Is there any diagnostic I can run to rule out a faulty card?

Is there possibly another way to add a controller?

 

Here's the output of lstopo (with --whole-io) in case it's useful, and thanks for any advice.

 

EDIT [PARTIALLY SOLVED]:

Just to follow up, I got it working with a different mini PCI card (linked below) although it's so slow it's almost unusable. Thankfully for my purposes (iphone pairing to enable wifi sync) that''s not a deal-breaker. I don't know whether the initial card was faulty or incompatible.

Syba 19-Pin USB 3.0 Header Mini PCI-Express Card

 

lstopo before and after shows the card is recognized. Anyone know what those numbers connecting the PCI devices mean?

Edited July 30, 2020 by CS01-HS

[CS01-HS]

Any ideas even if they're guesses?

 

I'm considering ordering a different m-pcie card to try and confirm the adapter's working but if I can probe either the controller or adapter in software that'd be better.

 

Or if it's hopeless and I'm wasting my time that would also be good to know.

 

Maybe I'll try running unraid from an M.2 sd card adaptor and surrendering all my USB ports to the VM.

Edited July 10, 2020 by CS01-HS

[CS01-HS]

Original post updated with progress.