Gemalpto Smart Card Reader only appears as "Shared" not "Passthrough"

you can manually enable passthrough mode. The reason why the passthrough mode was disabled was because we were stepping toes with a service called pcscd service that is required for the shared mode to work. However if you do not want to use the shared mode, you can manually disable shared mode and enable the passthrough mode

Here are the steps:

Shutdown the VM to which you want to passthrough the smart card and:

1) Go to the VM's installation directory. Typically C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Virtual Machines\

2) Open <virtual-machine-name>.vmx file

3) Append the following lines:

      usb.generic.allowCCID = "TRUE"

       usb.ccid.disable = "TRUE"

4) Kill the process corresponding to the PCSC daemon on the Linux host

Do a # ps -ef | grep -i pcsc on your Linux host

       sudo kill -9 <pid of the process that corresponds to pcscd>

Notes:

1) The first line in step 3 enables the passthrough mode

2) The second line in step 3 disables shared mode

3) Since you are killing the pcscd on your host, you wont be able to use the smart card on the host. You can passthrough the smart card now and use it in the VM

Hope this helps,