The -std-vga switch to qemu causes it to emulate a different graphics adaptor which supports larger screen modes. It would be nice if libvirt was able to pass this flag to qemu so that KVM based virtual machines could use large screen modes.
Created attachment 321000 [details] Patch to add -std-vga when starting qemu This is a simple patch which unconditionally adds -std-vga to the command line, but I guess it should probably be optional really. Given that it is specific to qemu based VMs I wasn't really sure whether the option should be in the features section or on the graphics adapter though?
*** Bug 431731 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 350443 [details] Patch to allow a VGA card model to be specified Recent versions of qemu have replaced -std-vga with -vga which allows one of several models to be selected. This actually makes adding support to libvirt a bit easier in as much as it's more obvious where to add it in the XML syntax. This patch (against the current 0.6.2 F11 package) adds a model attribute to the graphics card definition in the XML and passes it to the qemu -vga switch.
Created attachment 350444 [details] Patch for current libvirt CVS head This is the same patch reworked for the current CVS head if that's more convenient...
Just adding a 'model' attribute to the <graphics> tag has been rejected in the past. Dan Berrange posted an RFC patch back in May to add a <video> device which allows specifying a model: http://www.mail-archive.com/libvir-list@redhat.com/msg13520.html No movement since then though. Tom, if you wanted to fill out the qemu/kvm portion of the RFC and send to libvir-list, it would probably get the ball rolling again.
This is merged upstream and in forthcoming 0.7.0 release http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commit;h=ad6d5acb4228f0615bc3375817c85d0531f172e2