Can't use spice even though qemu-kvm-spice is installed

[Fabián Rodríguez]

EVen having spice enabled via the mentioned package, virt-manager guest creation crashes with the following message when choosing spice as the remote display method:
Unable to complete install: 'unsupported configuration: spicevmc not supported in this QEMU binary'

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: virt-manager 0.9.1-1ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-20.33-generic 3.2.12
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-20-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.95-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Apr 6 09:52:19 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release amd64 (20111012)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_CA:en
 TERM=xterm
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: virt-manager
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-03-06 (30 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[MvW (2nv2u)]

Although I didn't create the VM with spice, changing VNC to spice results in unbootable VM.
I've also installed qemu-kvm-spice, but it doesn't make a difference.

Error starting domain: unsupported configuration: spicevmc not supported in this QEMU binary

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

@Reason,

please show us the exact changes you made to the xml.

[MvW (2nv2u)]

@Serge, I did not change the XML but used virt-manager instead.

The XML without spice is:
    <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/>
    <graphics type='vnc' port='-1' autoport='yes'/>
    <video>
      <model type='vmvga' vram='9216' heads='1'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x0'/>
    </video>

With Spice:
    <channel type='spicevmc'>
      <target type='virtio' name='com.redhat.spice.0'/>
      <address type='virtio-serial' controller='0' bus='0' port='1'/>
    </channel>
    <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/>
    <graphics type='spice' autoport='yes'/>
    <video>
      <model type='vmvga' vram='9216' heads='1'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x0'/>
    </video>

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

Do you have the spice-vdagent package installed?

Can you look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SergeHallyn_spice? In particular, what is the <emulator> line in your xml? If you replace the video model type='wmvga' with model type='qxl', does that help?

[Sean (seanrijs)]

solved this by doing the following:

sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm-spice
cd /usr/bin/
sudo rm kvm
sudo ln -s qemu-system-x86_64-spice kvm

Maybe we need to inform the package maintainer to change the qemu-kvm-spice dpkg package to do this?

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

Quoting Sean (<email address hidden>):
> solved this by doing the following:
>
> sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm-spice
> cd /usr/bin/
> sudo rm kvm
> sudo ln -s qemu-system-x86_64-spice kvm
>
> Maybe we need to inform the package maintainer to change the qemu-kvm-
> spice dpkg package to do this?

libvirt looks for kvm-spice before kvm. After apt-get install
qemu-kvm-spice, libvirt should prefer to use kvm-spice over kvm.

[Tom Vaughan (tvaughan)]

@Sean's suggestion worked for me. libvirt didn't do it on its own. This is on an up-to-date 12.04. FYI.

[Tom Vaughan (tvaughan)]

See also: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qemu-kvm-spice/+bug/962376/comments/4

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

@Tom

then my guess would be that your VM definition has an <emulator>/usr/bin/kvm</emulator> line in it, which should be removed (or updated). Can you check to see whether that is the case? If not, then I don't know what is going on.

Perhaps there is something virt-manager could do, but I do not want the qemu-kvm-spice package (which is in universe) removing the kvm binary belonging to qemu-kvm (which is in main).

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

Ah, sorry, I just read the comment you linked to. Yes, that is precisely what I'd expect.

[Tom Vaughan (tvaughan)]

@Serge. Yes. It did. I put the kvm binaries back they way they were. I removed "<emulator>" as described. And it worked.

The problem may be that I created the VM *before* I installed and switched to SPICE. I just noticed that virt-manager has a setting for which video mode to use for new VM's - VNC or SPICE. I never looked at this prior to the SPICE install.

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

Thanks, Tom. Do you have any suggestions for a good place to document this? I have it documented at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SergeHallyn_spice but that's not helpful for most people. Perhaps a short section could go into the server guide, but as it's not in main i'm not sure that is appropriate.

[Tom Vaughan (tvaughan)]

I don't know. The problem seems to be with virt-viewer. The workaround is to edit the virtual machine's XML definition in /etc/libvrit/qemu. According to `dpkg -S` that's owned by libvirt-bin.

Perhaps we could add a "Common Problems and Workarounds" section to this wiki: http://virt-manager.org/page/Main_Page. A google search for "qemu kvm spice blank screen" doesn't turn up anything we could edit, including the virt-manager wiki. Which means anything we do may not be seen by anyone.

The right long-term solution seems to make virt-viwer switch to kvm-spice automatically when SPICE is chosen, and make the virt-viewer package depend on qemu-kvm-spice as long as it offers SPICE as a valid option.

[Marco (marcodefreitas)]

Do it on:

# virsh list
# virsh edit <KVM_GUEST>

[Felipe van Schaik Willig (felipevsw)]

C'mon, Cannonical... It's 2014 and we can't use spice on Virtual Machine Manager on Ubuntu out of the box?!?! We shouldn't need to do all these bazillions workarounds to make it work.

[Aaron (boxerab)]

Thank you guys!!!!! I had a similar problem, spent a whole day trying to upgrade qemu
and spice, and in the end just had to remove one line from the xml. Hallelujah!!