[vfio-users] alternative to input passthrough

[Andrew Morgan]

Hey Will,

I'm unable to test those symptoms on my own instance (a future post will
explain why), however there's a couple features of Synergy that you
might want to know about that may help you and others.

The mouse can be locked to a particular screen using scoll-lock,
preventing it from escaping to a different monitor. Additionally, one
can enable the " relativeMouseMoves" option on the server, setting the
speed of the mouse relative to the current OS. Rumor has it that running
Synergy in elevated mode also allows the mouse to move once it reaches
the edge of the screen.

Check out the Synergy User Guide for more info:
https://github.com/synergy/synergy/wiki/User-Guide

As you mentioned Will, virt-manager's feature of passing the USB device
in on the fly is quite useful, however in the situation that you perhaps
want to play a game, pause, then change your music on your Host OS, and
go back to your game, passing through the USB devices makes this much
more of a hassle. Synergy seems to handle this as if the two OS's were
simply two monitors of the same OS.

As a sidenote, Synergy seems to work best in an environment where you
have your Host OS and Guest VM running on separate monitors at the same
time. If you are in the situation where each of your graphics card
outputs feed into different inputs of a single monitor, USB passthrough
is probably more ideal as you'll only ever be seeing a single OS at a time.

Andrew Morgan

On 8/15/15 10:13 PM, Will Marler wrote:
> Hey Jose, > > In my experience, Synergy is more than good enough for a 1st-person
shooter as far as latency goes. I ran into other problem. It seems like
when a game takes over full-screen in Windows, the mapping of one unit
of movement of the mouse to one unit of movement on the screen becomes
... funky. For me, Skyrim was the best example. In Skyrim, one
fractional physical move of my mouse moved the cursor 150 or 200 pixels
on the screen. This made the game unplayable. I've experienced the same
thing in Bioshock Infinite and Metro 2033 to varying degrees. For those
latter 2 games I was able to get the games playable enough using mouse
sensitivity settings (in Windows and in the games themselves), but for
Skyrim I wasn't (granted, I didn't try as hard with Skyrim). > > Another
problem I've had is that Synergy seems to be bounded by a box, when
playing a full screen game. What I mean by that is that when I use the
mouse to turn the character, it will only go so far. As if the character
can only turn his head so far to the left. This happens both left,
right, up, and down. It's not a dealbreaker when playing the
single-player FPS's that I mentioned, but I imagine it would be if you
were playing something competitively multiplayer. > > The third problem
I had was when I was using Windows 7. For some reason, Windows 7 would
decided it couldn't boot, and go into a recovery mode. This recovery
mode would require a keypress or mouse clicks to exit; once exited the
VM would boot just fine. Unfortunately, Synergy wouldn't be running at
this stage, so passing through a USB mouse directly was the only option.
Windows 10 has yet to give me this problem. > > Passing through a USB
mouse is very easy using virt-manager. It can be done on the fly, with a
running VM, and it has the advantage of Windows detecting it (I have a
gaming mouse with a number of buttons and settings and Windows picks all
this up when the mouse is passed through directly, but doesn't when
Synergy is involved). The downside, of course, is that once you click
"apply," you no longer have use of that mouse in your host : ). For
that, I have a 2nd mouse, whose purpose is simply to interact with the
host, if that is necessary, while the guest is running. I still am using
Synergy for the Keyboard. > > Will > > On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 9:45 PM,
Jose Ramon Muñoz Pekkarinen <koalinux at gmail.com
<mailto:koalinux at gmail.com>> wrote: > >         Hi Andrew, > >        
Thanks for your answer! I didn't know about the arch wiki you pointed.
It's yet another great resource from the arch community. > >          I
have a couple of questions though. Is synergy responsive enough to play
something time demanding, lets say a shooter? Is there any way to avoid
using the bridged mode networking? > >          Thanks! > >         
José. >     ------------------------- >     From: Andrew Morgan
<mailto:andrew.morgan4453 at gmail.com> >     Sent: ‎15/‎08/‎2015 14:27
>     To: vfio-users at redhat.com <mailto:vfio-users at redhat.com> >    
Subject: Re: [vfio-users] alternative to input passthrough > >
> Check out Synergy, it allows control of the mouse and keyboard input
> without having to passthrough the devices. Guide here:
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Control_VM_via_Synergy
>
> -------
>
>         Hi,
>
>         I'm using vga passthrough so much nowadays, and I wonder if
> there is any
>     better option than passing through the usb devices to the machine,
> like using
>     vnc, or the brand new virtio keyboard and mouse coming in 2.4 version.
>
>         The setup in my case is working quite well but from time to
> time, the vm
>     hangs without any option to go back to the host, and I'd like to
> improve this
>     at some point.
>
>         Best regards.
>
>         José.
>
>
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