Re: KVM usability

Ingo Molnar
2010-03-01T09:25:31Z

* Zachary Amsden <zamsden@redhat.com> wrote:

> > Here's my experience with it:
> >
> > - qemu-kvm starts up with a miniature resolution by default. 640x480 - on my
> > 1680x1050 laptop screen. It's so small that initially i even overlooked
> > that i started it. It should multiplex pixels up to a reasonable screen
> > size by default.
>
> No virtualization emulator today does this, it is not a reasonable thing to
> do. Unless you are running compiz and use hardware scaling. We should look
> into it.

I tried VirtualBox and it does something sane here: while it does not give a
larger guest screen area, it at least creates a large enough X window, with
any border area whited out.

That looks far more pleasing aesthetically than the Qemu method of resizing
the full window wildly. The guest still resizes, but it stays within the same
X window and the border is white.

Also, with Windows guests, the Windows side resolution resizes dynamically if
the window is grown/shrunk by the user. (I suspect that is done via a paravirt
driver on the guest side, through 'Guest Additions'.)

Ingo