[vfio-users] Looking for recommendations for screen-switching

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

I have VFIO passthrough working with a Windows 10 VM, running on Fedora
25. Currently I have two cables running to my single monitor (one HDMI
and one DVI), so switching back and forth means toggling a monitor
setting. This does work, but is a bit clunky.

BTW the mouse and keyboard also switch back and forth (this slightly
surprised me but I'm not going to question it :-)

I thought I could make this simpler by exchanging the DVI cable for
another HDMI cable, both cables going into an HDMI switch and hence to
the HDMI port on the monitor, with the idea of toggling back and forth.
However this doesn't entirely work. I suspect that the switch powers
off the input it's not using and this confuses Windows.

Most of the discussion I've seen recommends Synergy, a software
KB/mouse switcher, however this explicitly does not support video
switching, i.e. it assumes you have a separate monitor for each machine
(real or virtual), which is not the case here.

The other option seems to be a physical KVM switch, but before shelling
out more money I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this. What do you
do to support a single monitor?

poc