vmware vga drivers in qemu-kvm are extremely buggy

[Manjul Apratim]

Binary package hint: qemu-kvm

Running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 up to date as the host.

kvm is enabled in the BIOS (Intel-VT).

apt-cache policy qemu-kvm

qemu-kvm:
  Installed: 0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.3
  Candidate: 0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.3
  Version table:
 *** 0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.3 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-proposed/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates/main Packages
     0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.1~vde1 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-virt/vde/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages
     0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages

Symptoms:

When I boot up a guest with -vga vmware, the screen output before X starts is choppy, and coughs up a refreshed display intermittently. After X starts up, the mouse pointer has artefacts and keeps jumping around. I have tried this on the following guests with slightly varying symptoms:

Arch Linux: extremely jumpy mouse to the point it was not usable, with xf86-video-vmware as vga driver. When I tried manually creating a file `10-monitor.conf' under /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and setting the driver to 'vmware', X completely crashed and froze at checking the log for errors - did not even dump me at the terminal so that I could delete the file, which I subsequently did using a Maverick LiveCD. With the regular xf86-video-cirrus driver, the screen freezes before X starts. Also, if I keep the xf86-video-vmware drivers and boot with -vga cirrus, I obtain sluggish performance as compared to xf86-video-cirrus.

Debian Testing: more or less fine, except that video performance is sluggish; artefacts observed upon trying to save images to disk from firefox. I did not do further testing.

Gentoo: the screen freezes before X starts, and I have to do a hard reboot. I did not install X on gentoo so I cannot comment on what would happen there.

Slackware: the screen freezes before X starts. Works normally with -vga cirrus or -vga std.

This seems to me an inherent problem with the vmware driver. I believe it is related to the following reports elsewhere:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/gentoo/+bug/414885

where the report was closed after testing with an Ubuntu Lucid guest,

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=499542

where fixing xorg.conf manually was the solution, but it caused X to crash for me,

http://<email address hidden>/msg14750.html

which details the same symptoms as I have found.

I would like to be able to use the vmware driver, as it is the only one that seems to allow me to use high-definition graphics in the guests - performing an xrandr on both Arch and Debian showed me a max of 800*600 on Arch, and 1024*768 on Debian with the std or cirrus driver, while it finds all HD modes with the vmware driver. It would be nice if I can use the full potential of my machine when I am doing a hardware assisted virtualization, because that is what I want to see anyway. I would prefer to use qemu-kvm over any other virtualization solution out there (I have long moved away from Virtualbox).

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

Hi,

do you have this problem also when you use vnc? I get very bad performance (and eventual complete hang) when I do '-vga vmware' when using SDL. But when I do '-vga vmware -vnc :1', it works quite nicely. However I'm using natty livecd as a guest. If vnc still causes a problem for you, then I'll go ahead and test with another distro.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for qemu-kvm (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]