Running in a virtual machine

When running SFPTotal Wizard inside a VirtualBox or Parallels virtual machine, you may experience repeated device disconnections or be unable to read or write transceiver memory.

This problem mainly occurs when the host operating system is OS X (macOS) or Linux and the guest operating system is Windows.

What causes this?

When a read command is executed, the application expects a 256-character response from the device through the virtual serial port. With virtualization, the guest operating system may lose part of the data sent by the device.

This is caused by problems with OHCI/EHCI USB controller emulation and the behavior of the standard virtual serial port driver.

Solution

To resolve the problem, select USB Controller (xHCI) in the virtual machine settings and connect the coding board through that controller.

If you cannot change the controller type, run the command:

USBDELAY=80

This command forces slower data transfer from the coding board to the computer, reducing the likelihood of data loss when the coding board interface is passed through to the guest operating system in the virtual machine.