Connect USB devices

Connecting a USB device to a distribution, as usbipd-win does for WSL, isn’t available in MSL. Linux can’t see a keyboard, serial adapter, security key or other USB device plugged into the Mac.

What you can do instead:

• USB drives: use them from macOS as usual, and copy files between the drive and your macOS folders, which distributions see under /mnt/macos. See Working across file systems.
• Linux-formatted drives: copy the whole drive into an image file on macOS (find its number with diskutil list, then sudo dd if=/dev/rdiskN of=drive.img bs=4m), and attach the image with msl --mount. See Mount a disk in MSL.
• Devices with macOS tools: use the macOS tool for the device (a flasher, a serial terminal) outside MSL. MSL never runs macOS programs from Linux.

Internally, msl --mount attaches disk images to the VM as USB mass storage, but that’s a virtual disk, not passthrough of a real device.