[devonnulled]

Since this needs to be enabled in the kernel at compile time, it really depends on what your favorite distribution chooses to include.

If it does end up being in the Big Two (Debian-flavored, RH-flavored) it really doesn't make sense for servers. If it was enabled by default this seems like something that you would need to do some sort of 'handshake' between to prevent someone from just mounting a USB device willy-nilly as they see fit. Complete speculation on my part though.

[anderiv]

It absolutely does make sense for servers. One frequent pain point with virtualized systems is that (at least in a VMware vCenter DRS-enabled cluster), you never know what physical host a specific VM will be on at any moment. This is a problem for software that requires a USB license dongle (many FlexLM-managed software have this requirement).

Anyway, in this situation, you would have one physical, bare-metal linux "usb dongle server", which then shares out its USB devices to one or more other linux VMs. After doing this, VMs can migrate between physical hosts without losing access to their license dongle.

There are purpose-built physical USB->IP devices out out there now, but they're quite expensive. This new functionality would allow admins to emulate this functionality for a fraction of the cost of a purpose-built device.

[devonnulled]

Ah, that's a use case I didn't even think of. Makes sense in that situation then. I rarely deal with things that require USB license dongles, but I can see that as being a pain this may alleviate.