kvm frustration...

[adler-wRvlPVLobi1/31tCrMuHxg at public.gmane.org (Stephen Adler)]

Hi blu...

Well... I've answered my own question and I'll pass it on to whom ever 
uses libvirt and the whole qemu/kvm viruatlization system linux is now 
providing...

qemu-kvm has a well defined command line switch to turn on a better 
graphics adapter, this is done by specifying the "-vga std" command line 
option. There is a rather complex interface between all the libvirt 
software layer, which includes the nice GUI interfaces to control the 
action of virtual guests and the final execution of the qemu-kvm 
command. Part of the complexity deals with having to set up the 
networking interface. In any case, as it turns out, the configuration of 
each virtual guest system is specified in an xml formatted file stored 
in /etc/libvirt/qemu. Further more, the latest libvirt documentation on 
the web (libvirt.org) specifies an xml video tag which should allow one 
to specify which type of video adapter the virtual system will have. The 
problem is that libvirt, the one which comes with fedora 11, does not 
recognize the video tag, so your left with the default video controller 
of qemu-kvm which is rather limited.

So... the hack which I put together was the following.

cd /usr/bin
mv qemu-kvm qemu-kvm-orig
echo '#/bin/bash' > qemu-kvm
echo '/usr/bin/qemu-kvm-orig $* -vga std'
chmod +x qemu-kvm

And now I've basically hard-coded the vga controller type. Now I can use 
virt-manager to control the state of my virtual guests and get the 
better graphics controller.

According to some mailing lists that I ran across while googling all 
over the internet trying to find a fix, the <video> tag will be 
available in the next release of libvirt.

Cheers. Steve.


On 09/27/2009 05:09 PM, Stephen Adler wrote:
> Hi blu...
>
> Well.. I'm rather blue right now... I've spent all afternoon trying to
> figure out how to get virt-manager to configure a guest with the -vga
> std option. It uses the default vga hardware which limits me to only
> 16bit at 1024x1200. Does anyone know how to shoe horn in any other kind
> of vga hardware when starting up a kvm host through the virtual manager
> interface? I'm running fedora 11 right now.
>
> Cheers. Steve.
>
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