qemu + spice with spicec/spicy

[eleanor]

Hi,

I have a problem with connecting to qemu guest virtual machine by using SPICE with clients:

• spicec
• spicy

Spicec works, but it automatically grabs my keyboard/mouse, which is undesirable, because then I cannot use my host system shortcuts anymore. On the following link I was reading that it's possible to disable automatic keyboard/mouse grab by setting SPICE_NOGRAB to 1: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/s ... 14643.html

The following command doesn't work, and spicec will still grab my keyboard/mouse:

# export SPICE_NOGRAB=1; spicec -h 127.0.0.1 -p 5900

Spicy doesn't grab keyboard/mouse by default, which is ok, but when connecting to the virtual machine, the screen doesn't get updated. When I connect to the guest VM and start a program like Chrome, it starts, but isn't visible on the screen. The really weird part is that if I move my mouse over the desktop, the mouse pointer will change whenever occurring the screen border, letting me resize the window although I don't see it. If I reconnect with spicy I can see the window now and it's like this for everything I do regarding screen updating: closing the window, starting a new program, pressing the start menu, etc.

Any ideas how to solve any of the above problems?

[paradigm-X]

Try adding a tablet device to the Qemu guest, which may help prevent the mouse grabbing issue. It worked for me when I was having a similar issue. It is also recommended in such case.

[eleanor]

Hi,

I'm already using the "-usbdevice tablet" option now, but that only synces the mouse pointers correctly, it doesn't have anything to do with mouse grabbing: that's the job of the spice client.

[paradigm-X]

> ... it doesn't have anything to do with mouse grabbing: that's the job of the spice client.

Hmm. We must be using different version of Google. You may want to double-check your references because I found quite a few that said on the contrary that the tablet setting can indeed affect grabbing of the mouse one way or another:


http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-doc.html

"‘tablet’

Pointer device that uses absolute coordinates (like a touchscreen). This means qemu is able to report the mouse position without having to grab the mouse. Also overrides the PS/2 mouse emulation when activated."



https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/906864

"Always mouse grabbing with -usbdevice tablet"

QEMU
Bugs
Bug #906864

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Also, as I mentioned, it did indeed have a similar effect on one of my VMs.

[eleanor]

Hi,

What I'm trying to say is that spice client also affects when the mouse gets grabbed or not. I'm using the tablet option and the mouse gets grabbed with spicec, but not with spicy, which is why I'm trying to use spicy, but it doesn't work (the problem I already described).

Maybe you can post your whole qemu-kvm command so I can try it out with exact settings as you have?

I should probably also mention I'm running Windows 7 guest VM inside qemu.