Qemu-KVM Spice performance is terrible

[grooveman]

Hello. I have been mucking about with this for some time now.

I have qemu-kvm installed and I'm trying to use spice, because it allows me two monitors, allegedly allows for clipboard inter-op and allegedly performs great.

I have not found the last two to be true, hence, the "allegedly". The most irritating things are the lag from the keyboard input and compression. I find that the keyboard input and screen-paints sometimes lag as much as a couple seconds -- and is always at least 1/2 a second. The session always looks like a really overly-compressed jpeg file, making some fonts near impossible to to read, and making everything else look terrible.

I have an Intel Xeon hexecore system with 24 GB of ram (and I'm throwing 16 of that at my guest OS). The guest OS is Windows 7.

I have tried adding cores, boosting video memory (which never seems to do anything) and playing with all manner of flags for qemu. Nothing works. It seems half the information I read about re: spicec is not implemented yet in the stable Gentoo packages. I doubt they would save me, even if they were.

I have triple-checked myself against the wiki. I have all my kernel modules and options selected.

I have also checked myself against this wiki as well.

I have all the virtio components available in the kernel active. I have checked this against this page, and they are all present, except for the CONFIG_VIRTIO_RING portion, I couldn't find that anywhere, but it did say it is configured automatically.

I have also installed the Windows Guest Tools on the virtual machine.

I have already posted this in the gentoo forums, and this on the bugs page, but no insight yet... it does seem possible that this problem is due to a lack of video memory, but as this is my first attempt with spice... I cannot tell where one would end and the other would begin.

My command for starting my qemu-based virtual machine:

[szatox]

I don't see anything simply wrong there, however you might try -vga vmware or default, cirrus instead.
Vmware is the one used by virt-manager (also with spice)

[grooveman]

[szatox]

Honestly I have no idea, never really tried big, virtual desktop. I don't know whether you must have qxl or not.
The defaults are pretty sane though, and they make a good starting point. While I'm more into headless stuff and only briefly touched spice, the image I got from libvit was both clear and responsive. Qemu alone with cirrus in sdl mode also does fine as soon as linux inside enters graphic mode, however scrolling through text-mode console is not so good.

[grooveman]

Still having problems... I really think it is the video memory thing... I'm surprised that this has not been fixed yet...
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