Running bladeRF in a Linux virtual machine on a windows host

[drelectro]

For those who may be interested I now have my bladeRF working reasonably well (but not perfectly) in a Linux Mint 15 VMware instance on a win7 host.

Here's what I found:-

- Virtualbox doesn't support USB3.0, it seems to be a no-go at this stage for me anyway.

- VMware Player V 5.x did not list the bladeRF in the list of removable devices, so that was a no go too.

- I upgraded to VMware Player 6.0.0 and the bladeRF is now listed in VMware's list of removable devices

- bladeRF-cli on the VM is able to see the bladeRF but cannot load the FPGA image

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mike@Linux-Mint-VMware ~/projects/gnuradio $ bladeRF-cli -l bladeRF-lib/hostedx40.rbf 
[INFO] Found a bladeRF
[ERROR] Failed to retrieve serial number
[INFO] Claimed all inferfaces successfully
[WARNING] Could not extract serial number
[WARNING] Could not extract VCTCXO trim value
[WARNING] Could not extract FPGA size
Loading fpga...
[INFO] Change to alternate interface 0
Error: failed to load FPGA: Operation timed out
Could not load fpga
[ERROR] could not access peripheral
[ERROR] could not access peripheral
[ERROR] could not access peripheral
[ERROR] could not access peripheral

- I built the windows version of bladeRF-cli and that is able to load the FPGA image

- An attempt to load the FPGA from the VM will wedge the bladeRF, and it must be power cycled before loading the image via windows in this case.

- If I disconnect the bladeRF from the VM, load the FPGA image using windows and then re-connect the bladeRF to the VM it works and I can successfully run osmocom_fft in the VM and get live data

- After a time I get the following error:-

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[ERROR] Error reading samples (-1): LIBUSB_ERROR_IO
Failed to read samples: File or device I/O failure

- How quickly this happens seems to depend upon the sample rate I select.

- Re-starting osmocom_fft gets things going again, no need to reset or re-load anything.

All in all not perfect but certainly a step in the right direction.

[dk5ras]

I have it running on a Kubuntu 12.04, inside VMware 10 on a Win8 machine. USB3.0 is still not working, otherwise it runs just fine, without any issues

Ralph.