[Bug 649254] [NEW] vmware vga drivers in qemu-kvm are extremely buggy

[manzdagratiano]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: qemu-kvm

Running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 up to date as the host.

kvm is enabled in the BIOS (Intel-VT).

apt-cache policy qemu-kvm

qemu-kvm:
  Installed: 0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.3
  Candidate: 0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.3
  Version table:
 *** 0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.3 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-proposed/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates/main Packages
     0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9.1~vde1 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-virt/vde/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages
     0.12.3+noroms-0ubuntu9 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages

Symptoms:

When I boot up a guest with -vga vmware, the screen output before X
starts is choppy, and coughs up a refreshed display intermittently.
After X starts up, the mouse pointer has artefacts and keeps jumping
around. I have tried this on the following guests with slightly varying
symptoms:

Arch Linux: extremely jumpy mouse to the point it was not usable, with
xf86-video-vmware as vga driver. When I tried manually creating a file
`10-monitor.conf' under /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and setting the driver to
'vmware', X completely crashed and froze at checking the log for errors
- did not even dump me at the terminal so that I could delete the file,
which I subsequently did using a Maverick LiveCD. With the regular xf86
-video-cirrus driver, the screen freezes before X starts. Also, if I
keep the xf86-video-vmware drivers and boot with -vga cirrus, I obtain
sluggish performance as compared to xf86-video-cirrus.

Debian Testing: more or less fine, except that video performance is
sluggish; artefacts observed upon trying to save images to disk from
firefox. I did not do further testing.

Gentoo: the screen freezes before X starts, and I have to do a hard
reboot. I did not install X on gentoo so I cannot comment on what would
happen there.

Slackware: the screen freezes before X starts. Works normally with -vga
cirrus or -vga std.

This seems to me an inherent problem with the vmware driver. I believe
it is related to the following reports elsewhere:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/gentoo/+bug/414885

where the report was closed after testing with an Ubuntu Lucid guest,

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=499542

where fixing xorg.conf manually was the solution, but it caused X to
crash for me,

http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm@vger.kernel.org/msg14750.html

which details the same symptoms as I have found.

I would like to be able to use the vmware driver, as it is the only one
that seems to allow me to use high-definition graphics in the guests -
performing an xrandr on both Arch and Debian showed me a max of 800*600
on Arch, and 1024*768 on Debian with the std or cirrus driver, while it
finds all HD modes with the vmware driver. It would be nice if I can use
the full potential of my machine when I am doing a hardware assisted
virtualization, because that is what I want to see anyway. I would
prefer to use qemu-kvm over any other virtualization solution out there
(I have long moved away from Virtualbox).

** Affects: qemu-kvm (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: kvm qemu qemu-kvm vga vmware

** Summary changed:

- vmware vga drivers qemu-kvm are extremely buggy
+ vmware vga drivers in qemu-kvm are extremely buggy

-- 
vmware vga drivers in qemu-kvm are extremely buggy
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/649254
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