qemu disables screensaver

[Jaap Versteegh]

lucid, with compiz and fglrx:

Screensaver on host will not kick in when qemu is running (kvm or no kvm). It seems to be related to the fact that the idle time reported by libXss.so on the host is being reset every four seconds or so when qemu is running, eventhough there is no activity on either guest or host.

[Michael Tokarev (mjt+launchpad-tls)]

Debian bugreport about this: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=578672 (#578672).
I tried it here again, with your program (using 0.12.4 from debian) - and it works as expected for me, no resets every 4 secs, screen saver triggers after configured time even if the input is grabbed by kvm window (Ctrl+Alt). Hmmm?

[Jaap Versteegh (j-r-versteegh)]

When I run
$xtrace qemu

I get:
001:<:00xx: 4: Request(115): ForceScreenSaver mode=Reset(0x00)

every 4 seconds, which explains things I suppose.
Why is that??

[Jaap Versteegh (j-r-versteegh)]

Looks like it is SDL related, because setting
SDL_VIDEO_ALLOW_SCREENSAVER=1
fixes it.

I understand disabling the screensaver is the default in SDL so the screensaver won't activate while watching a movie or playing a game. http://www.libsdl.org/faq.php?action=listentries&category=9#90

Since I don't think this behaviour is desirable for qemu, I guess it would be useful to prevent the disabling of the screensaver in code.

[Anthony Liguori (anthony-codemonkey)]

This is now fixed by:

commit 111f8ec99b67aeef152c71a5db12f0c0cb2422bd
Author: Jan Kiszka <email address hidden>
Date: Sun May 23 10:29:34 2010 +0200

    sdl: Do not disable screensaver by default

    Unless we are running in full-screen mode, QEMU's SDL window should not
    disable the host's screensaver. The user can still change this behaviour
    by setting the environment variable SDL_VIDEO_ALLOW_SCREENSAVER as
    desired.

    Signed-off-by: Jan Kiszka <email address hidden>
    Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <email address hidden>