Bug 797772

Summary:	Use vga as the default display adapter
Product:	[Community] Virtualization Tools	Reporter:	Marko Myllynen <myllynen>
Component:	virt-manager	Assignee:	Cole Robinson <crobinso>
Status:	CLOSED UPSTREAM	QA Contact:
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	unspecified	CC:	acathrow, berrange, crobinso, cwei, dallan, dyuan, eblake, herrold, hyao, juzhang, mazhang, mzhan, notting, rjones, ydu
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:	795688	Environment:
Last Closed:	2013-10-02 22:54:15 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Marko Myllynen 2012-02-27 09:34:45 UTC

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #795688 +++

Description of problem:
Libvirt leaves the policy of the default display adapter hardware up to the hypervisor meaning that with QEMU one gets Cirrus instead of vga. However, as can be shown with glxgears vga provides much better FPS rate than Cirrus (these numbers are from RHEL 6.2 host/guest on a Lenovo laptop):

cirrus : 78 FPS
vga    : 260 FPS

Please make vga as the default display adapter in libvirt when using QEMU.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
RHEL 6.2

Additional info:
With the proposed optimizations in the bugs below the difference is even greater to vga's advantage:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=795685
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=795686

--- Additional comment from pm-rhel on 2012-02-21 12:11:42 EET ---

Since this issue was entered in bugzilla, the release flag has been
set to ? to ensure that it is properly evaluated for this release.

--- Additional comment from rjones on 2012-02-21 12:30:07 EET ---

libvirt leaves the policy up to qemu, so make this argument
on the upstream qemu mailing lists first.

--- Additional comment from dallan on 2012-02-22 18:57:24 EET ---

Marko, I understand what you're saying, but libvirt explicitly leaves this kind of decision up to either qemu or to management applications using libvirt (e.g., ovirt, virt-manager), so I have to close this as NOTABUG.  I'm sure that there are places where we've failed to follow that rule, but in general we try to honor it.

--- Additional comment from eblake on 2012-02-22 19:38:44 EET ---

(In reply to comment #3)
> Marko, I understand what you're saying, but libvirt explicitly leaves this kind
> of decision up to either qemu or to management applications using libvirt
> (e.g., ovirt, virt-manager), so I have to close this as NOTABUG.  I'm sure that
> there are places where we've failed to follow that rule, but in general we try
> to honor it.

That said, we should probably open bugs against virt-install and virt-manager so that default creation of new guests prefers vga where appropriate, rather than deferring to hypervisor defaults.

--- Additional comment from myllynen on 2012-02-27 11:31:08 EET ---

(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #3)
> > Marko, I understand what you're saying, but libvirt explicitly leaves this kind
> > of decision up to either qemu or to management applications using libvirt
> > (e.g., ovirt, virt-manager), so I have to close this as NOTABUG.  I'm sure that
> > there are places where we've failed to follow that rule, but in general we try
> > to honor it.
> 
> That said, we should probably open bugs against virt-install and virt-manager
> so that default creation of new guests prefers vga where appropriate, rather
> than deferring to hypervisor defaults.

I've now proposed this change in the upstream mailing list:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2012-02/msg03274.html

Per Eric's suggestion I'll clone this bug against virt-install and virt-manager.

Thanks.

Comment 2 Dave Allan 2012-02-27 14:04:35 UTC

Cole, what do you think?

Comment 3 Cole Robinson 2012-02-27 14:56:13 UTC

We already use vga for windows guests by default, but historically linux guests have not worked with vga IIRC, at least not out of the box. If that isn't the case now we could possibly change it, but modern guests should be using qxl anyways, which we default to for recent fedora at least.

So if anything we should be trying to use qxl everywhere rather than vga. But in the absence of people supporting qxl in RHEL asking for the virt-manager default to be changed, I don't think we should be tweaking this now since it's just going to expose a less tested code path.

Comment 4 Cole Robinson 2012-02-28 17:37:03 UTC

*** Bug 797769 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5 Cole Robinson 2012-03-01 23:36:52 UTC

Deferring to 6.4 at least

Comment 6 Eric Blake 2012-03-27 18:00:42 UTC

*** Bug 807415 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8 Cole Robinson 2013-10-02 22:54:15 UTC

As mentioned before, we already use spice everywhere by default, including virt-install these days. And where there's spice, there's qxl. So that should cover this (qxl has a fallback vga mode)