Description of problem: When creating a new VM through virt-manager, SPICE support is enabled even when qemu-kvm is built without SPICE support. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): libvirt-0.9.13 virt-manager-0.9.4 virtinst-0.600.3 qemu-kvm-1.1.1 Steps to Reproduce: 1. Build qemu-kvm without SPICE support 2. Create new VM 3. try to boot it initially Actual results: Initial boot of VM fails due to missing SPICE support Expected results: The VM is created with VNC instead, maybe the user notified about this change. Additional information: log from #virt: [00:49:55] <eliasp> Cardoe: which component is responsible for this? [00:50:09] <jlogan1> eliasp: I also noticed SPICE (kvm-spice) on Ubuntu does not have rbd support [00:50:13] <Cardoe> I'd say its really libvirt's issue since it doesn't have in QemuCaps the knowledge of SPICE support. [00:50:32] <eliasp> Cardoe: ok [00:50:43] <Cardoe> jlogan1: Might be another thing we need to probe for. [00:51:08] <Cardoe> eliasp: Dan and Eric can yell at me for saying the wrong thing later. [00:51:43] <eliasp> haha, let's see ;) [00:52:30] <eblake> I heard that :) [00:53:06] <eblake> you're probably right that QemuCaps should add a capability for level of spice support, since we've proven that in the wild there are different defaults [00:53:32] <eblake> any time a blind assumption gives awkward results, adding another QemuCaps makes it easier to make for useful error messages instead
Sorry this never received a response. The root issue is that there's no way that spice support is communicated up from qemu through libvirt to virt-manager, so virt-manager doesn't know not to default to spice. That said virt-manager has a global option to change from spice->vnc (in the preferences dialog), in these cases I just recommend using that.