[Spice-devel] Possible Windows vdagent problems

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Tue, 2011-07-05 at 12:31 +0300, Arnon Gilboa wrote:
> John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> > On Tue, 2011-07-05 at 09:44 +0300, Arnon Gilboa wrote:
> >   
> >> Hi John,
> >> See my comments below.
> >> Arnon
> >>
> >> John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> >>     
> >>> Hello, all.  I'm spinning this off of the "Unfair Comparisons with RDP"
> >>> thread as that one is getting a bit long.  However, in it, Yaniv
> >>> identified that we were not using vdagent in our Windows guest based
> >>> upon the packet traces we submitted.  That sounded plausible as we have
> >>> noticed the agent being quite unstable.  We are often unable to connect
> >>> or the session seems to die.  We then connect as administrator via RDP
> >>> and restart the RHEV Spice Agent and all is well again.
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >> Can you please be more specific with regards to "agent being quite 
> >> unstable"?
> >> Please describe the problems, and we'll try to solve them.
> >>     
> >
> > Alas, there is not more than I have already said.  Often, when we try to
> > access the guest via SPICE, we simply get a black screen and then a
> > connection timeout.  We connect to the guest via RDP as admin, restart
> > RHEV Spice Agent service and we are then able to login.  Every once in a
> > while, the SPICE client stops responding.  We restart the RHEV Spice
> > Agent service as described and we are now able to work again.  There is
> > nothing in event logs to indicate there was a problem.
> >
> >   
> Try disabling power saving / sleep in your guest and see if it still 
> reproduced.
> In case it still happens, please send your %windir%\temp\vdservice.log & 
> %windir%\temp\vdagemt.log files.
> >> <snip>> So then I thought our qemu configuration must be off or the needed
> >>     
> >>> options were not support in our version (0.8.8).  However, that does not
> >>> appear to be the case:
> >>>
> >>>    <controller type='virtio-serial' index='0'>
> >>>       <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x09' function='0x0'/>
> >>>     </controller>
> >>> [ports='16' seems to be missing - I tried adding it but it was ignored and subsequently removed]
> >>>     <channel type='spicevmc'>
> >>>       <target type='virtio' name='com.redhat.spice.0'/>
> >>>       <address type='virtio-serial' controller='0' bus='0' port='1'/>
> >>>     </channel>
> >>>
> >>> When I dump the XML to native, I get:
> >>> -device virtio-serial-pci,id=virtio-serial0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x9
> >>> -chardev spicevmc,id=charchannel0,name=vdagent
> >>> -device virtserialport,bus=virtio-serial0.0,nr=1,chardev=charchannel0,id=channel0,name=com.redhat.spice.0
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >> I run qemu with the following:
> >> -device virtio-serial -chardev spicevmc,id=vdagent,debug=0,name=vdagent 
> >> -device virtserialport,chardev=vdagent,name=com.redhat.spice.0
> >>     
> >>> So what is wrong that we appear to not be using vdagent and why do we
> >>> need to keep restarting it? Thanks - John
> >>>   
> >>>       
> > <snip>
> > Although the settings we use seem to be straight out of the
> > documentation, we are certainly willing to change them.  Would we change
> > <controller type='virtio-serial' index='0'>
> > <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x09'
> > function='0x0'/>
> > </controller>
> > to
> > <controller type='virtio-serial' index='0' ports='16' vectors='4' />
> > ?
> >
> >   
> and what will you gain from this change?
> > Thanks - John
> >
> >   
> 
Thanks, Arnon.  I did not realize the high performance power settings
still turned off the display.  I've just disabled that and we'll see how
it goes.

The change was to make our configuration match yours.  We are using
-device virtio-serial-pci,id=virtio-serial0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x9
and you said you were using
-device virtio-serial

Is there an advantage one way or the other? Thanks - John