alt Hacker NewsHi HN, I built this after hitting a wall with Bluetooth passthrough on Proxmox: Intel's onboard Bluetooth/WiFi combo chips (BE200, AX210, AX211, and others) are built so only the machine that boots them can drive them. Hand the chip to a VM via USB passthrough and it wipes its own firmware, no setting fixes it. It's how the hardware works. Also flaky on gaming distros like ChimeraOS/Bazzite even with add-on dongles :-/
Instead of fighting passthrough, this keeps the adapter on the Proxmox host, let's share it into the VM over the local network via BlueZ. 2 simple commands: run the installer on the host, run it again inside the VM pointing at the host's IP. The VM sees a normal Bluetooth adapter and pairs like usual. Both sides auto-reconnect on reboot.
Works for game controllers in a gaming VM, Home Assistant BLE sensors, headphones, anything that expects a normal adapter.
I would be happy to answer questions about the approach.
Most BT adapters clear their firmware and need reinitialized when enumerated on USB. USB passthrough, properly configured, is transparent to the adapter. You should simply need to run the correct drivers with the correct firmware package inside your guest.
I've had no problem passing through the same card to a full fat Manjaro VM. The WiFi was flaky last time I tried, but the Bluetooth was always fine.