[Spice-devel] qxldod driver for Windows 11

[John Paul Morrison]

The quickemu scripts (GitHub) seemed to work well with Win11 and swtpm.

That’s too bad about Spice - so development is stopped?

On Sat, Sep 3, 2022 at 8:30 AM Carlos González <piteccelaya at gmail.com>
wrote:

> First, thanks *very* much for your complete explanations, and at the same
> time offering apologies. Not justifiable, but I was kind of anxious and a
> bit desperate of finally setting up a win11 VM with SPICE just the way I
> did with win10.
>
> I think this is already well known but, why SPICE? For me, because of all
> the following features:
> ---Graphic acceleration --even if just 2D, QXL worked *far* better than
> any other available virtual driver
> ---All the paravirtualized drivers, which are still offering the best
> performance
> ---Easy USB and sound redirection
> ---Clipboard sharing
> ---Copy-and-paste --even if just files and only from host to guest
> ---Automatic resolution resizing with SPICE window
> And perhaps other ones I may be already forgetting...
>
> I already know what's said about software in general, that it's big enough
> and *always* comes and goes. But now that SPICE in general is dead, or in
> the process of, it'll take many years for another entire solution offering
> *all* these features to appear.
>
> I no longer want to set up windows VMs with generic virtualized drivers,
> and all what you just explained further supports this way of thinking.
>
> So, humbly trying to ask here, what else can I do? Or where else to try
> asking?
>
> Thanks very much and apologies again.
>
> P.S.: small offtopic: I'm also having problems trying to set up TPM2
> emulation for win11 VM, using swtpm package. I think the author, user
> "stefanb", is an IBM employee, but employees never offer free support...
> Where could I ask for support with this? Thanks again.
>
> El sáb, 3 sept 2022 a las 6:38, Frediano Ziglio (<freddy77 at gmail.com>)
> escribió:
>
>> Il giorno ven 2 set 2022 alle ore 22:23 Carlos González
>> <piteccelaya at gmail.com> ha scritto:
>> >
>> > So the "rumors" are true: you (in general) really did discontinue/kill
>> the qxl drivers, if not the entire SPICE project soon. Was it because IBM?
>> Since being sold to them the first one to die was Centos, now this...
>> >
>>
>> Hi Carlos,
>>    In Italy we use the expression "È come sparare sulla Croce Rossa"
>> (more or less "it's like shooting at the Red Cross").
>> It's like accusing a doctor trying to save a life that it's trying to
>> kill somebody.
>> As Victor is actively contributing to SPICE as a developer (you can
>> find multiple recent emails and commits in this ML and related
>> projects without much effort) is not kind to point fingers.
>>
>> > FYI:
>> >
>> https://gist.github.com/pojntfx/b860e123e649504bcd298aa6e92c4043#file-main-sh-L32
>> >
>> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/virglrenderer-devel/2021-January/001897.html
>> > virtio-gpu implies virgl, and currently only works on Linux guests;
>> RedHat people explicitly deemed the Windows work "not worthy".
>> >
>>
>> Let's get back to the technical side of this thread.
>> That's not entirely true. Virgl it's an "option" to virtio-gpu. By
>> default Virgl is not enabled. Virgl adds 3D support to Qemu virtual
>> cards, as far as I know it's the only virtual GPU (bypass are not
>> virtual) in Qemu supporting 3D. Although QXL was born alongside SPICE
>> while Virgl is more related to Qemu directly, efforts were made to
>> support all features QXL provides using virtio-gpu. So the technical
>> suggestion Victor gave is not against SPICE. You have also to consider
>> the way QXL works and how the graphics software stacks evolved in
>> time. QXL design it's 2D only, supporting a lot of specific commands
>> and options for Windows 95/98/XP. Yes, you read well, Windows XP...
>> which was declared unsupported 12 years ago! At that time OSes relay
>> to the GPU plenty of complex 2D commands. Nowadays most OSes (if not
>> all but surely Linux, Windows and Mac) use 3D commands for everything,
>> and many brushes, raster operations and similars are long since gone.
>> Taken all that into account, with a modern OS the commands QXL and
>> virtio-gpu use are basically the same.
>>
>> > Thanks for killing the project.
>> >
>>
>> Now let's get back to the less technical.
>> Beside reiterating that pointing fingers to Victor is not fair nor kind...
>> Yes, SPICE was, company wise, well founded and supported by Red Hat
>> (which _had_ a specific team for it). After RedHat was acquired by IBM
>> some investments were moved from desktop side to the cloud. More or
>> less RedHat/IBM thinks that spending money on Linux desktop is not
>> worth much. That includes SPICE, Virgl and Windows drivers but others.
>>
>> Regards,
>>   Frediano
>>
>> > El vie, 2 sept 2022 a las 6:53, Victor Toso (<victortoso at redhat.com>)
>> escribió:
>> >>
>> >> Hi Carlos,
>> >>
>> >> On Fri, Sep 02, 2022 at 12:08:04AM +0000, Carlos González wrote:
>> >> > I downloaded latest virtio-win ISO, and by browsing it I
>> >> > noticed that, unlike the other drivers, for the qxldod one
>> >> > there's only up to win10, and no explicit win11 versions.
>> >> >
>> >> > Does this mean that there are no drivers for Windows 11, and no
>> >> > possibility of setting up a VM with full SPICE support?
>> >> >
>> >> > Thanks beforehand.
>> >>
>> >> You are correct, the last cycle of development was focused for
>> >> windows 10.
>> >>
>> >> I expect windows 11 to maintain some compatibility with windows
>> >> 10 so the drivers should work to some extent but I did not test
>> >> it.
>> >>
>> >> I'd not hope for further development on qxl unless there is
>> >> someone interested in investing time on it (and it would take
>> >> some time).
>> >>
>> >> I'd instead switch to virtio-vga / virtio-gpu as this seems to
>> >> have an active community.
>> >>
>> >>     https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows
>> >>
>> >> Cheers,
>> >> Victor
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/spice-devel/attachments/20220903/012255d7/attachment-0001.htm>