The low level C api developed by Redhat for managing various hypervisors including KVM is in preparation for it's next release. Among the features that will be included is support for usb device passthrough which is a feature many readers here have been asking about. However, the new features will not be available until the next release of virt-manager and various tools dependent on libvirt.

Among the new features that’s soon to be released, the following apply to qemu/kvm.

• USB device passthrough for QEmu/KVM
• boot of CDRom devices in QEmu/KVM
• check for migrate support with qemu
• check against double create with qemu
• broken open failure detection in qemu
• UUID string conversions in QEmu
• avoid segfault on KVM CD eject
• avoid crashes for interface without a name in QEmu
• use "server" option when using serial/telnet with QEmu
• fix disk ordering and avoid duplicate in QEmu XML parsing
• detect failure in QEmu eject command
• add support for eject on floppy and SCSI cdroms for QEmu