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UpRunTech
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Containers and USB other than storage.

Mon Jan 16, 2023 7:26 am

New to this but can't find an answer. Would it be possible to run a container with some kind of software defined radio in it and connect to an SDR dongle in the RB5009's USB port? Can USB be passed through this way?
 
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Amm0
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Re: Containers and USB other than storage.

Mon Jan 16, 2023 10:01 pm

Although an SDR controlled by a container on router be nifty...

Container doesn't really give you access to kernel drivers, so no USB. Additionally some SDR functions are CPU intensive or have specific timing needs, so imagine that be a 2nd problem even if USB was plumb'ed to a container.
 
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Re: Containers and USB other than storage.

Mon Jan 16, 2023 10:41 pm

Container doesn't really give you access to kernel drivers, so no USB. Additionally some SDR functions are CPU intensive or have specific timing needs, so imagine that be a 2nd problem even if USB was plumb'ed to a container.
Fair enough. It seemed the CPU power in an RB4011 or better RB5009 with USB would be good for say a WebSDR.
 
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Re: Containers and USB other than storage.

Mon Jan 16, 2023 10:57 pm

It seemed the CPU power in an RB4011 or better RB5009 with USB would be good for say a WebSDR.
It very well may have enough CPU power for a lot of things ;). And "native" docker on PC does support USB via --device to redirect USB...

I have an Ettus B210 that I use a SpecA, etc in a VM on Mac which works through USB redirection (since not a lot of direct SDR support), so the approach can work.

I guess you could see if your SDR shows up as a serial port in RouterOS (System>Ports in winbox, /port/print in CLI). Mikrotik does allow TCP redirection of serial data, IF there was a port found for the device – but not sure that help with I/Q data from an SDR & you'd still need something in the container to get the TCP network stream to the SDR software... But if you have SDR and RB5009, see if RouterOS detects it be step one (very unlikely however). It may be worth it to collect a supout.rif if you do this...and open a feature request at help.mikrotik.com for "USB redirection in container" (the supout.rif would have the USB device id for them at least).
 
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Re: Containers and USB other than storage.

Tue Jan 17, 2023 11:17 pm

SDRs need raw USB transfers, none works with just serial port (that's too low rate for anything usable). So yes, full USB pass-trough would be needed to run say SpyServer in a container...
I have ran it before on RBM33 with OpenWRT, RB5009 should have plenty of CPU power to handle SDR without problems... as long as USB support is there and it's not buggy.

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