[Spice-devel] Disappearing mouse cursor in Autocad 2006 drawing window in WinXP VM with Spice+QXL video driver

[David Jaša]

Hi Giuseppe,

Giuseppe Bilotta píše v Ne 10. 02. 2013 v 08:51 +0100:
> Hello all,
> 
> I've been addressed to this mailing list after reporting the issue
> mentioned in the topic on #spice.
> 
> Here are the details of the issue I'm seeing. This machine has a Virtual
> Machine with Windows XP installed to be able to run AutoCAD 2006.
> The host operating system is Debian unstable, and the relevant package
> versions are as follows:
> 
> libvirt 0.9.12-6
> qemu-kvm 1.1.2+dfsg-5
> libspice-server1 0.11.0-1
> 
> On the Windows XP running in the VM I also installed the Spice guest
> drivers, latest version that I could find on the Spice webside download
> page, 0.3.
> 
> The VM is usually managed through the virt-manager GUI, although I've
> done some XML hand-editing during the tests to work around the issue,
> and I've also tried using spicy as a viewer to see if the issue was with
> virt-manager itself.
> 
> The issue seems to happens in AutoCAD 2006 _only_. I haven't been able
> to reproduce the same problem in other (open source or otherwise freely
> available) applications.
> 
> Specifically, what happens is that, when running the VM with Spice and
> using the QXL Windows driver, the mouse cursor in the Autocad drawing
> area _disappears_. The mouse is still functional, and getting out of the
> drawing area (such as by moving to a toolbar or whatever) makes the
> (standard) mouse cursor appear correctly, but obviously the program is
> not usable.

The first part of what you see is a feature - drawing with "arrow"
cursor on top of autocad crosshair is not very pleasant, so I reported
it as a bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=810588 almost
year ago.

The second part is actually a bug an if it wouldn't be fixed, it would
deserve its own bug report.

There were lots of fixes of various rendering issues in spice-server in
last months so the bug could be traced to one of them (they live mostly
in Red Hat/RHEL bugzilla but they are publicly visible).

David

> 
> This does _not_ happen when running with the VNC display from
> virt-manager, or when running with the standard VGA driver from Windows.
> However, under these circumstances, mouse motion is rather jerky, making
> the VM very uncomfortable to use. It _does_ happen when using spicy
> instead of virt-manager to view the VM, if using QXL as video driver.
> Disabling vdagent inside the VM does _not_ fix the issue (even though it
> does make the mouse cursor motion jerky).
> 
> Lowering the video acceleration in the Advanced video card options in
> Windows does _not_ fix the issue (and it does make the mouse cursor
> motion jerky), although I have had some mixed results with this, in the
> sense that I remember this having worked during one attempt. Disabling
> the spice acceleration and video compression options (host-side) doesn't
> fix the issue either.
> 
> I am not sure about what Autocad 2006 does when the mouse enters the
> drawing window, (although I suspect it does something like hiding the
> mouse cursor and drawing cross-hairs where the mouse cursor is supposed
> to be, with the second step is failing with the QXL driver in Spice). I
> have tried a couple of other programs, but none of them seem to hack
> around the Windows cursor as Autocad 2006 does, so I haven't beel able
> to reproduce this issue with other applications.
> 
> If anybody has any suggestion on how I could further help to debug this
> issue, please let me know.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Giuseppe Bilotta
> _______________________________________________
> 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
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