Connect USB devices to WSL2 on Windows 10

How to connect USB devices to WSL2 distribution running on Windows 10

Intro

Using WSL2 on Windows 10 is nice but it does not support USB out of the box.

To do so you will need to recompile the Linux Kernel used by your WSL distro, install usbipd on your windows machine and grant your user admin rights.

Create a new distro with USB/IP enabled

To do so follow the excellent guide from the USB/IP repo here.

• <install-path> can be any path on your PC, I’ve set it to my user home.
• <user> is the username used in your original SWL2 instance.

The new WSL2 distribution wsl2-usbip will have the kernel module to work with USB\IP. Note that this distribution does not share data with the original distribution.

Install USBIPd on windows 10

winget install usbipd

This should be enough. Check dorssel/usbipd-win for more info.

Grant your user admin rights

If you are like me and your user does not have admin rights but you have access to an admin user do as follow:

Open a powershell with admin right

Add-LocalGroupMember -Group "Administrators" -Member "<GROUP>\<user.name>"

More info here.

Connect USB to WSL distribution

Discover which USB device you can share with WSL2.

In powershell or cmd

C:\Program Files\usbipd-win> .\usbipd.exe wsl list
BUSID  VID:PID    DEVICE                                                        STATE
2-4    04d9:0296  USB Input Device                                              Not attached
2-6    0c45:6a09  Integrated Webcam                                             Not attached
2-8    0a5c:5842  Dell ControlVault w/o Fingerprint Sensor, Microsoft Usbcc...  Not attached
2-10   8087:0026  Intel(R) Wireless Bluetooth(R)                                Not attached
4-2    0bda:8153  Realtek USB GbE Family Controller #2                          Not attached
5-4    046d:0825  USB Video Device, USB Audio Device                            Not attached
8-1    046d:c246  USB Input Device                                              Not attached
11-3   0b0e:0300  Jabra EVOLVE 20 SE MS, USB Input Device                       Not attached
11-4   0483:3748  STM32 STLink                                                  Not attached

connect i.e STM32 STLink in powershell or cmd with admin rights (elevated)

.\usbipd.exe wsl attach --busid 11-4 --distribution  wsl2-usbip

in the WSL2 shell (wsl2-usbip) that you can ran with wsl --distribution wsl2-usbip --user <user>

❯ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0483:3748 STMicroelectronics ST-LINK/V2
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Enjoy.