Parallels 9 Firewire in Mac Guest

The promotional material for Parallels 9 (http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/) says:

New! Connect Thunderbolt and Firewire devices to either your Mac or your virtual machine – just like you do with USB devices
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Does this work for a Mac OS X Lion as a guest operating system?

I want to know if I will be able to use my Firewire scanner with Lion in a virtual machine.

Thanks

William

 

The video "New Features in Parallels Desktop 9 for Mac" seems to suggest this refers only to storage devices. I don't think that's really a new feature since you've always been able to use partitions on external storage devices as Boot Camp virtual disks. The new feature part is that now Parallels can add the external storage device to your virtual machine while it's running.

 

I did some testing. Firewire hard disks will mount as a USB hard disk drive device. Only partitions that Parallels allows for Boot Camp virtual hard disks will be included (FAT, NTFS, but not HFS) in the new virtual USB hard disk drive device. Or maybe not any partitions if it's not formatted in a specific way, since it seems that it doesn't work properly with some disks - I don't see any files on a disk formatted like this:

Code:

Joes-Mac-Pro:~ joevt$ sudo gpt show -l /dev/disk10
gpt show: /dev/disk10: Suspicious MBR at sector 0
       start        size  index  contents
           0           1         MBR
           1           1         Pri GPT header
           2          32         Pri GPT table
          34    48234489      2  GPT part - "BootCamp2"
    48234523    46137344         
    94371867  1858891120      1  GPT part - "Ext1"
  1953262987      262148         
  1953525135          32         Sec GPT table
  1953525167           1         Sec GPT header
Joes-Mac-Pro:~ joevt$ sudo fdisk /dev/disk10
Disk: /dev/disk10	geometry: 121601/255/63 [1953525168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1: EE    0   0   2 -    0   0  34 [         1 -         33] <Unknown ID>
*2: 07    0   0  35 - 1023 254  63 [        34 -   48234489] HPFS/QNX/AUX
 3: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused      
 4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused      

I tried it with an eSATA disk but Parallels did not intercept the disk mount. This seems kind of dumb since there's no difference between a mount from FireWire and a mount from eSATA or any other type of device such as disk image, internal SATA, USB, smartcard, thunderbolt, etc.

It would be nice if the feature could work with any of those types of devices so that I don't need to shutdown the virtual machine and add a virtual hard disk that points to the device. This already works with CDs and disk images if you use them as a CD or floppy depending on the size of the disk image.

Couple other problems:
1) If you set Devices preferences to "Ask me what to do?", it only asks you once. Then every other time it will just mount it to the Windows machine even if you set the preference to "Connect it to my Mac".

2) There's no way to reconnect the drive to the virtual machine after ejecting it without disconnecting and reconnecting the Firewire cable.

Anyway, the feature as is is currently half-baked at best.

 

Yes, I did some investigation and it seems to only work with storage devices. The web page I listed at the start of this thread is very misleading. Not all Firewire devices are for storage!

 

Creating a FireWire virtual device that uses FireWire hardware is a difficult thing. Maybe more difficult then what Parallels has to do for USB.

This hard drive storage feature builds on existing work that Parallels has already done: Boot Camp virtual hard disks + USB devices.

That doesn't mean Parallels hasn't done work that could get us real FireWire and Thunderbolt support. Parallels Workstation Extreme (Windows only) has a feature that allowed using Network and Video adapters directly using Intel VT-d chipset features but not all Macs have a chipset/firmware capable of supporting VT-d. I don't know why Parallels limited their VT-d support to network adapters and some video adapters. Maybe each type of device needs a different type of passthrough driver to work. Note that Parallels Workstation Extreme cost several times more than Parallels Desktop because of its features and actually isn't being sold anymore.

 

Considering the new Mac Pros that are coming, with their dual graphic and network adapters and their 6 thunderbolt ports, I think it's inevitable to bring the features of PW Extreme to the Mac, and we might have a PDME in the near future.