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

[Giuseppe Bilotta]

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.

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