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

[Alon Levy]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 01:42:07AM -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> 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/
> 
>

Forgot to mention: to let the vm accept self signed certificates you need to:
bcdedit.exe -set TESTSIGNING ON

(see http://spice-space.org/page/WinQXL, and the source is http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5698617/signing-x64-driver-with-test-certificate)