[Spice-devel] Various problems with "-vga qxl"

[Peter Daum]

Hi,

Inspired by a talk at last week's "Linuxtag" that sounded pretty promising, I started playing with qemu/spice to evaluate whether this would be a good solution for a problem I'm working on: serving remote (mostly windows)-: desktops with decent performance over slow WAN links.

I got the core sources from your server (spice 0.8.1, spice-protocol 0.8.0, celt-0.5.1.3, pixman+slirp+quemu from git), everything else from my system (Debian sqeeze, amd64) and followed the instructions from the "Spice User Manual" except where they seemed outdated). The first steps worked fine, but then I got stock with some problems trying to get the qxl graphics driver working.

Problem #1 was that as soon as I started quem with "-vga qxl" I got a guest window with size 0x0. This happens with a local SDL window as well as via spice. Looking around in this list I read about some unrelated problems involving the parameter "qxl-vga.vram_size". Experimenting with this, I discovered that a explicitly set vram size between 9 and 32 MB works around this issue (when set it to 48 MB, it's the same as without this parameter).

Then I installed a Windows XP guest system. For the installation I used the default cirrus vga, then switched to "-vga qxl". Despite identifying the "graphics card" as "VGA compatible" Windows XP won't let me install any of the builtin VGA drivers, otherwise everything seems to work neither better than worse than with the default VGA. When I install the Win32 qxl driver (which XP will happily accept), the only available graphics mode is the classic "Standard VGA" (640x480/4-bit - clearly no improvement ;-)

Is this a known issue? Any suggestions are welcome.

Regards,
                       Peter

P.S.: Despite these problems, it still does look promising. I really appreciate your efforts and hope that spice will spread quickly! (similar experiments using other virtualization over RDP or VNC were pretty disappointing ...)