We just released this in OrbStack :) https://docs.orbstack.dev/features/usb

Blog post soon

What happened to Orbstack for like 9 months until earlier this year? Suddenly everything went silent for a bit and I was pretty concerned. Glad y’all are back!!!!

Thank you for sharing this - I looked into OrbStack a few months ago, and this was the reason I didn't use it (as my primary purpose was to have an external wifi adapter for wifi pwnage).

Yeah I find this useful for redirecting storage/sdcard*, so you can format linux filesystems or use other tools.

* need a usb sdcard reader for macbook pro cause the builtin is not usb)

We're working on block device passthrough for the builtin SD reader.

Agreed! There's some good improvements around Accessory Access in virtualization framework this year also - checkout: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/224/?time=2...

I wonder if the custom virtio can be used to support attaching the built-in sdcard readers on macs which aren't exposed as usb.

I just added this to Lima recently, hopefully the macOS container machines support it too: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/pull/4866

I've successfully tinkered with USB/IP with Apple containers, but it does require loading a custom kernel (which they make pretty easy, thankfully). On the host side, macOS also doesn't make it easy to unload a driver that attaches automatically.