[libvirt] [RFC] default video device type

[Martin Kletzander]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 05:16:51PM -0500, Cole Robinson wrote:
>On 11/13/19 8:22 AM, Martin Kletzander wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 07, 2019 at 02:56:11PM +0200, Pavel Mores wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm looking into fixing
>>>
>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1668141
>>>
>>> (as a short summary, if a graphics device is added to XML that has no
>>> video
>>> device, libvirt automatically adds a video device which is always of type
>>> 'cirrus' - even if the underlying qemu doesn't support cirrus).
>>>
>>> I'm able to affect the behaviour in question by using qemu
>>> capabilities in
>>> qemuDomainDeviceVideoDefPostParse(), see proof-of-concept change in
>>> [1].  I
>>> have a couple of questions though:
>>>
>>> 1) is this a proper place and approach to fix the bug?
>>
>> I don't think so because the guest ABI could change.  Imagine there is an
>> application that just starts a simple VM (with graphics with no model)
>> and out
>> of nowhere (after a long time) they upgrade libvirt and qemu and the VM
>> will
>> look differently.
>>
>>> 2) what would be the full specification of expected behaviour?  The
>>> bug report
>>>   only states that the video type shouldn't be cirrus but doesn't say
>>> what it
>>>   should be. [2] gives some information about the order of preference
>>> of video
>>>   device types but I was wondering if there are any opinions about
>>> this on this
>>>   list?
>>>
>>
>> Reading the BZ it looks to me like virt-manager should allow choosing
>> cirrus and
>> the different default could be chosen in virt-manager.  The BZ is not well
>> described, to be honest.
>
>My take on the bug was: libvirt shouldn't use a default configuration
>that we blatantly know will result in unbootable qemu. So, don't use
>cirrus when qemuCaps tells us that the qemu binary definitely doesn't
>have cirrus support.
>

Oh, I missed that.  I was going through old tagged e-mails with no reply, that's
how I got here.  If this resulted in unbootable qemu, that's of course something
we can and should change.

>Pavel's v2 series changes the behavior to:
>
>* use cirrus if it's available, so current working behavior is maintained
>* if cirrus is unavailable but vga _is_ available, use that. this fixes
>the rhel case, but also likely fixes the default for non-x86 archs that
>didn't ever have cirrus
>* if cirrus and vga aren't available, explicitly error that the user
>needs to specify a video model because we didn't find one for them.
>
>Which all sounds good to me.
>

Me too!  Thanks for the update.

>Thanks,
>Cole
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