[Spice-devel] Windows QXL driver - low pixel depth, low resolution, laggard mouse

[John A. Sullivan III]

Hello, all.  We have recently jumped into SPICE with both hands and feet
as we are intrigued with the possibilities.  But, we've hit a few rocks
along the way!

The immediate problems with our two test Windows installations (Windows7
and Windows Server 2008 running as KVM guests in Fedora 15) using the
QXL driver is that the pixel depth appears to be 4-bits, the only
available resolutions are 640x480 and 800x600, and the mouse is unusably
lagged.

Here are the details.

Spice client compiled from
http://www.spice-space.org/download/releases/spice-0.8.1.tar.bz2 on
Debian Squeeze.

I believe the Windows QXL driver and vdagent were compiled from the
same.  Phil, could you please confirm that.

KVM is from Fedora 15 yum repositories.

Our first attempt on Windows 7 yielded a screen with appropriate pixel
depth and quite responsive video however the mouse was nearly unusable.
We checked the video driver and it appeared to be using VGA rather than
QXL despite:
    <channel type='spicevmc'>
      <target type='virtio' name='com.redhat.spice.0'/>
      <address type='virtio-serial' controller='0' bus='0' port='1'/>
    </channel>
    <input type='tablet' bus='usb'/>
    <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/>
    <graphics type='spice' port='5800' tlsPort='5801' autoport='no' listen='0.0.0.0'/>
    <video>
      <model type='qxl' vram='65536' heads='1'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x0'/>
    </video>

This seemed to be due to the QXL driver being unsigned.  We next put up
a Windows Server 2008 wondering if the mouse problem was a Windows 7
issue.  We were able to test sign the driver.  Anticipating splendid
success, we were deeply disappointed when we still had not only the
mouse problem but now saw the pixel depth and resolution problem.

We then test signed the QXL driver on Windows 7 and, lo and behold, the
same pixel depth and resolution issues appeared now that we were indeed
using the QXL driver.

What did we do wrong? We would dearly love for this to work and we are
sure it must be working for someone if it is being used in production.
Thanks - John