ubuntu 16.04 host, windows 10 guest, cannot passthrough mount an audio CDROM

Question

On my setup, which is an Ubuntu 16.04.3 host with a number of guest machines, I can successfully passthrough a "data" CDROM to a windows 10 guest VM, but I cannot get an audio CD to be visible on the guest.

The windows guest reports the following error (dialog box):

"Windows can't access this disc.  The disc might be corrupt.  
Make sure that the disc uses a format that Windows recognizes.  
If the disc is unformatted, you need to format it before using it."

In the host's syslog, I see these messages repeating:

Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.640360] sr 6:0:0:0: [sr0] tag#12 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.640362] sr 6:0:0:0: [sr0] tag#12 Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.640364] sr 6:0:0:0: [sr0] tag#12 Add. Sense: Illegal mode for this track
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.640367] sr 6:0:0:0: [sr0] tag#12 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 01 00
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.640369] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 64
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.640374] Buffer I/O error on dev sr0, logical block 16, async page read
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.656345] sr 6:0:0:0: [sr0] tag#14 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.656348] sr 6:0:0:0: [sr0] tag#14 Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.656350] sr 6:0:0:0: [sr0] tag#14 Add. Sense: Illegal mode for this track
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.656353] sr 6:0:0:0: [sr0] tag#14 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 00 00 11 00 00 01 00
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.656355] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 68
Dec  7 19:02:32 lwobker-vms kernel: [  582.656359] Buffer I/O error on dev sr0, logical block 17, async page read

Both the host, a linux guest, and the windows guest can successfully see/read a regular "data" CDROM.

Answer 1

This is probably not going to ever work the way you might want it to.

First, accessing an audio CD is an ancient legacy protocol completely different from accessing a disc with data. KVM provides no way to virtualize an audio CD. To do this, you will have to passthrough the entire CD-ROM device to the guest. You can do this in virt-manager by adding storage, providing the device special for the CD-ROM drive, and setting its device type to LUN Passthrough.

If your guest doesn't already have a virtual SCSI controller, you'll need to add one, and then add its associated Windows driver. The VirtIO SCSI controller is recommended as it's paravirtualized and will give better performance.

If you intend to play audio CDs, be aware that the analog audio output is almost always hardwired to the analog sound card (when it hasn't just been left disconnected because nobody plays audio CDs anymore). This means the sound will not come out in the guest at all, but in the host. An audio player that rips the digital audio CD data and then plays the resulting digital data will be able to play audio in the guest, though I don't know of any such players for Windows offhand. But if you're just ripping data to make FLAC or MP3 files, then this should be fine.