[Spice-devel] No hardware acceleration on win7

Fri Oct 12 00:00:27 PDT 2012

Hi David,

Oke, a new install of the guest and the virtio drivers are installed. Still the video performance isn't what SPICE can provide. Dragging windows in the guest still feels sluggish and when I stress the device. After installing spice on the server by using apt-get install qemu-kvm-spice, should I do more? It feels like a performance issue on the server, not the guest.

Also, I am still receiving these warnings every now and again: (/usr/bin/kvm-spice:2111): Spice-Warning **: red_parse_qxl.c:406:red_get_image: guest error: missing palette on bitmap format=2

I've seen what SPICE can do, but I can't get close to that kind of performance. So frustrating, because it looks like such an awesome product :)
Tom

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: David Jaša [mailto:djasa at redhat.com] 
Verzonden: donderdag 11 oktober 2012 15:01
Aan: Tom Wijmenga
CC: spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
Onderwerp: Re: [Spice-devel] No hardware acceleration on win7

Tom Wijmenga píše v Čt 11. 10. 2012 v 14:48 +0200:
> Thanks for the response David,
> 
> Running the following command gave me BSOD's about 5 seconds after booting

you need to install a driver for virtio-blk first. The best way to do it
is during installation (attach virtio iso or floppy image from
https://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/ and let windows find
the drivers), the second best way is:
     1. keep your c: drive as ide, add another virtio drive, attach
        virtio iso
     2. boot to windows, it will ask for driver for the new device,
        point it to the iso, have the driver installed
     3. shut down the VM, remove second block device, switch first
        device to virtio
and your Windows should be booting just fine from virtio device.

David

PS: why aren't you using libvirt? It could save you a lot of repetitive
manual work necessary to to run you qemu VMs...

> kvm-spice -cpu host -name test-win7 -enable-kvm -m 3000 -M pc-1.2 -net nic,macaddr=DE:AD:BE:EF:95:D0 -net tap,script=/etc/qemu-ifup -usb -drive file=/var/vmmachines/test-win7.img,if=virtio,cache=none  -vga qxl -spice port=5901,disable-ticketing
> 
> How should it be used, if not like this?
> 
> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: David Jaša [mailto:djasa at redhat.com] 
> Verzonden: donderdag 11 oktober 2012 14:17
> Aan: Tom Wijmenga
> CC: spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> Onderwerp: Re: [Spice-devel] No hardware acceleration on win7
> 
> Tom Wijmenga píše v Čt 11. 10. 2012 v 08:56 +0200:
> > Hi there,
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > After installing Spice on Ubuntu Quantal Quetzal and setting up a Win7
> > host with the QXL drivers (which are found correctly), things aren’t
> > working as they should. The performance of the graphical layer isn’t
> > optimal. There are three issues I found:
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > ·        When stressing the VM by playing a full hd movie, the CPU of
> > the guest OS tops at 100% and the performance is reduced massively
> > 
> > ·        I get quite a few warnings on the Hypervisor saying: 
> > 
> > (/usr/bin/kvm-spice:3756): Spice-Warning **:
> > red_parse_qxl.c:406:red_get_image: guest error: missing palette on
> > bitmap format=2
> > 
> > ·        When adding the Audio driver to the command line to run the
> > guest, video performance of the guest is completely gone when
> > stressing it by playing  any kind of video. The audio is working
> > correctly, but the video performance is drastically reduces. The
> > command for this: kvm-spice … -device
> > AC97,id=sound0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x5
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > The command I use to start the Windows 7 guest: kvm-spice -cpu host
> > -name win-7 -enable-kvm -m 3000 -M pc-1.2 -net
> > nic,macaddr=DE:AD:BE:EF:95:D0 -net tap,script=/etc/qemu-ifup -usb
> > -drive file=/var/vmmachines/win-7.img 
> 
> Do I see correctly that you don't use virtio interface for the disk or
> NIC? That could contribute to the sluggishness of your video experience,
> because IDE (if you play from disk) or rtl8139/e1000 emulation (if you
> play from network) can eat non-negligible amount of CPU cycles.
> 
> > -vga qxl -spice port=5901,disable-ticketing
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > I used Ubuntu 12.10 server (Beta 2) as hypervisor, the server is able
> > to support hardware acceleration.
> 
> Spice doesn't support hardware acceleration so that won't help you. The
> HD video on HD scren is actually probably most CPU-intensive thing you
> can do with spice VMs because the flow is like this:
>      1. you get the video stream or file from somewhere (which can take
>         its share of CPU cycles as explained above)
>      2. your VM has to decode the video
>      3. your VM has to scale the video to screen size (only if video
>         pixel doesn't match screen pixel 1:1 of course)
>      4. spice-server takes video frames and encodes them to the mjpeg
>         stream
>      5. client decodes the stream and may scale it again
> 
> As you can see, there's quite some room for improvement but the work
> involved is quite big (because most-straightforward way to defer video
> scaling to the client - emulating video overlay such as xv - won't help
> you for flash and html5 videos, you'd have to emulate OpenGL and/or
> VDPAU) so don't expect this to change anytime soon.
> 
> David
> 
> >  To install all tools, I ran apt-get install qemu-kvm-spice
> > 
> > QEMU emulator version 1.2.0
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > I’m basically stuck with proving the capabilities of SPICE, which I
> > know are amazing, but I can’t get it to work properly.
> > 
> >  
> > 
> > Kind regards, 
> > 
> > Tom 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Spice-devel mailing list
> > Spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/spice-devel
> 

-- 

David Jaša, RHCE

SPICE QE based in Brno
GPG Key:     22C33E24 
Fingerprint: 513A 060B D1B4 2A72 7F0D 0278 B125 CD00 22C3 3E24