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

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Thu, 2011-06-16 at 01:34 +0200, Alon Levy wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 09:35:57PM +0100, Damien Churchill wrote:
> > On 15 June 2011 21:11, --[ UxBoD ]-- <uxbod at splatnix.net> wrote:
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > >> 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.
> <snip>> >
> > > Alon (Redhat Dev) has a patch for QEMU which should hopefully fix the 4bpp issue but the binary and necessary libraries he sent me would not run successfully on our server. It was execute and then hang and eventually time out. Perhaps, as discussed, we could build from source though I wonder why that patch has not been fully committed yet?
> > > --
> > 
> > Is the patch available to try anywhere? I'd like to give it a test and
> > see what happens.
> 
> attached.
<snip>

Argh!!! I recompiled the rpms from the srpms after applying the patch
and thought for sure our woes would be ended! Alas, perhaps we have 8
bit color now and we still have a maximum resolution of 800x600 :(

What next?

I double checked the BUILD directory to confirm the patch was applied.

Perhaps I did not upgrade the proper RPMS? here is the list of what was
created:

qemu-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-kvm-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-system-m68k-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-user-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-common-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-kvm-tools-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-system-mips-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-debuginfo-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-system-arm-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-system-sh4-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-img-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-system-cris-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-system-x86-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm

Of these, I installed:
qemu-kvm-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-common-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-kvm-tools-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-img-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm
qemu-system-x86-0.14.0-8.fc15.x86_64.rpm


I did reboot after upgrading the RPMs just in case.

I'll paste in our build procedure below in case I mangled something.
Thanks - John

Retrieve the Fedora qemu SRPM
wget
http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/15/Fedora/source/SRPMS/qemu-0.14.0-7.fc15.src.rpm
Install rpmbuild and related packages (yum install rpm-build
redhat-rpm-config intltool)
Install dependencies:
yum install  SDL-devel zlib-devel texi2html gnutls-devel
cyrus-sasl-devel libaio-devel pciutils-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel
ncurses-devel texinfo spice-protocol spice-server-devel
su - compuser  (NEVER build rpms as root)
mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS}
echo '%_topdir %(echo $HOME)/rpmbuild' > ~/.rpmmacros
Still as compuser do:
rpm -i qemu-0.14.0-7.fc15.src.rpm
Go to the SOURCES directory and download the appropriate patch:
cd ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES
Copy in the 0001-vga-VBE-report-maximum-VGA_MEM_SIZE-memory.patch file
Go to the SPECS directory, backup and then edit the qemu.spec file as
follows:
cd ../SPECS
Change Release to 8%{?dist}
Add the line:
Patch19: 0001-vga-VBE-report-maximum-VGA_MEM_SIZE-memory.patch
before the Patch20: line
Add the line:
%patch19 -p1
before the %patch20 -p1 line
Build the RPM from the SPECS directory (rpmbuild -ba qemu.spec)
The RPM will appear in ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/