Would an attempt at adding built-in USB attach be welcomed?

[Ryan Cornish (ryancornish)]

Hi all,

Before I sink real time into this I wanted to ask the team and community whether it's a direction you'd accept contributions for, or whether it clashes with internal plans.

I'm interested in working on first-class USB device support in WSL. The idea is roughly what usbipd-win does today, but actually built in (installed with WSL itself), managed through the CLI, carried over Hyper-V sockets rather than the virtual network, and with quality-of-life details like auto-reattach handled for you (hopefully possible with Q3).

A few questions before I start:

1. Is built-in USB support already on the internal roadmap? The FAQ has said "investigating" for a while and I'd rather not duplicate work that's underway.
2. If not, is this something you'd accept as a contribution to microsoft/WSL, or would you prefer improvements go to usbipd-win instead?
3. Doing this properly would likely involve a Windows kernel-mode driver, which would require me to buy/setup driver-signing and publishing capabilities (EV cert, Windows Hardware Platform etc). Is there any path where Microsoft would handle that side if the code were accepted?

Happy to start small with a prototype and share results if there's interest. Mainly I want to check the direction is welcome before committing to it.

Thanks.