QEMU's Assortment Of Virtual VGA/GPU Options & What To Pick For Desktop Virtualization

[starshipeleven]

In that video you don't use QXL, you use vga vmware???

For those wondering what is that, it's the KVM interface compatible with VMWare tools driver. And yes VMWare binary driver for Windows was the best back then, and it's still pretty good now. I wonder why the guy didn't mention this in the blog.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/QEMU/Options#Graphics_card

vga vmware - VMware SVGA-II, more powerful graphics card. Install xf86-video-vmware in Linux guests, VMware Tools in Windows XP and newer guests.

[starshipeleven]

When I first learned about the QXL option, I thought it offered some sort of video acceleration (like VirGL) or even 60Hz, but no, it didn't... (not even through a SPICE viewer)

Possibly stupid question, but it's not terribly clear in many tutorials: did you install QXL drivers (and Spice guest tools in general) in the guest?
https://www.spice-space.org/download.html (see "windows binaries" for windows and check the distro's packages for linux guest stuff)

I did notice a significant performance difference for Windows guest (before installing drivers it was lagging like hell).

[tildearrow]

Possibly stupid question, but it's not terribly clear in many tutorials: did you install QXL drivers (and Spice guest tools in general) in the guest?
https://www.spice-space.org/download.html (see "windows binaries" for windows and check the distro's packages for linux guest stuff)

I did notice a significant performance difference for Windows guest (before installing drivers it was lagging like hell).

Ooooh, that explains, but what about Linux? (and especially Android?)

[starshipeleven]

Ooooh, that explains, but what about Linux? (and especially Android?)

For Linux it depends on the distro, they usually have in the repositories the spice packages to be used if they are installed as a guest OS.

For Android, there isn't much because not a lot of VM guest drivers implement OpenGL ES (VirGL will eventually), all ways that work decently run it in a container of some kind so the Android OS can access the true hardware.

[tildearrow]

For Linux it depends on the distro, they usually have in the repositories the spice packages to be used if they are installed as a guest OS.

I remember having tried that, but I didn't see my framerate increase to 60...

For Android, there isn't much because not a lot of VM guest drivers implement OpenGL ES (VirGL will eventually), all ways that work decently run it in a container of some kind so the Android OS can access the true hardware.

I do use VirGL (and it's fairly smooth) but sometimes it hangs the VM and gets in my way.

[SystemCrasher]

I like virtio, at least for Linux guests (well, I don't use proprietary systems anyway). Works reasonably, I never had major bugs with it and at least it fast enough to display even youtube 1080p without me spotting major system-level resources problems or so. QXL also works, but I eventually had weird bugs in certain versions of guest vs host interaction. Most linux kernels anyhow making sense with displays usually have virtio gpu support and quite often also QXL, at least x86-64 ones do.

On emulated ARMs I use just serial console, it can boot straight into VM in same terminal as used to boot VM, could be convenient - terminal tab just turns to VM.