From my experience: I would consider usage stable for an average user, but I'm not sure about set-up for a non-technical user. a) In my specific case, I am forced to use Windows because a lot of simulation and computational tools are only available on that platform, but I chose to operate in a VM rather than baremetal. As a result, I have both memory and cpu intensive simulations running in the guest for days at a time, and idle for weeks/months (shutdown only for host maintenance etc). Have never had guest or host crash or freeze (even through guest restarts). b) I cannot provide comment, I am also running qemu as root. I intend to look at how to move away from root execution of qemu but haven't yet (virtsh makes this easier/possible from what I've read but haven't looked in detail). c) I am also still using qemu from command-line so cannot comment, but I have been watching progression of virtsh and virt-manager. I think it already is at/getting to that point. d) I am using synergy to switch between screens/share kb and mouse with guest. In my case, if the mouse is left on guest side, the guest can lock but synergy prevents the host from locking. The mouse needs to be on host side for me. Also, my guest and host lock independently, so I'm not sure if there is a way to synchronize this. Copy/paste generally works well with text in both directions, however there seem to be some issues with more recent versions of synergy upstream that makes the server portion to hang/crash that seems to be related to the copy buffer (though I'm not 100% sure this is the cause). I haven't encountered this in a while, so it has been intermittent in my case. One good thing about synergy is that you can set it up so that scroll lock key will lock the mouse/kb to one side (guest or host) if you plan to work or game in that environment for a long session, and don't want the mouse to accidentally switch context on the screen edge/boundary. This also makes fullscreen and FPS games playable in the guest without the mouse going nuts from losing relative position information. <div class="gmail_quote">On Feb 25, 2016 22:59, "Daniel Pocock" <<a href="mailto:daniel@pocock.pro">daniel@pocock.pro</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Is a passthrough VGA configuration currently considered stable and secure for widespread use, for example, where non-technical users can work productively with applications running this way in an office environment? Some specific things come to mind: a) crashes: I've seen crashes mentioned in a few discussions, but are there many people running it for days and weeks at a time without crashes? Are such issues specific to particular hardware and can they be avoided by using hardware that is preferred/more heavily tested by the developers? b) security: in my testing so far, I just run the qemu command as root. To what extent can the use of root privileges be avoided? I realize a VM is never 100% secure compared to a normal user session. c) control: some of the blogs and wikis mention that tools like virt-manager and virt-install don't fully cope with passthrough VGA configuration, is that still up to date? Can the user start and manage the VM using some GUI from their X desktop on their host display? d) interaction between VM and host desktop: when the user locks the host display (screensaver), can this also lock the VM's passthrough display, or the user will always need to lock both? How well does something like Synergy work across the displays, especially for things like cut-and-paste? _______________________________________________ vfio-users mailing list <a href="mailto:vfio-users@redhat.com">vfio-users@redhat.com</a> <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users</a> </blockquote></div>