Spice Tools For Windows

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Penny Bozic

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Aug 3, 2024, 4:56:46 PM8/3/24

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Is it safe to remove the QEMU Guest Agent? Will I lose the ability to send commands to the VM via virsh if I do? Any explicit problems with leaving both intact (it all seems to be working fine right now)?

"QEMU Guest Agent" is one specific component of the 'virtio-win' set of drivers offered by RedHat. For a list of all components, check -docs/en-US/creating-windows-virtual-machines-using-virtio-drivers.html#virtio-win-iso-contents. These components are not installed all at once as part of a package; instead, the user is expected to manually install what is needed for their particular case.

This is different from the SPICE agent: according to the download page you linked ( -space.org/download.html) and also the source repository ( -nsis), this one includes the qxl video driver and the vioserial (VirtIO serial driver). The latter is a dependency, as the agent communicates with the host through a VirtIO serial channel. The former may be just convenience, or may be needed for automatic resolution switching - I don't know for sure.

So, even though the 'SPICE guest tools' installer for Windows includes some of the virtualization drivers for Windows offered by RedHat, the qemu guest agent itself is not part of the package, and is also not related.

Once installed, it runs as a Windows service (you can find it in services.msc) and should start automatically. It enables better integration between guest and the hypervisor through a virtio-serial channel (like SPICE) but for management purposes.

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I found a setting in "spicy" that I assumed had an equivalent in virt-maanger. To connect with spicy from spice-client-gtk apt package, I found the port to connect to by checking sudo ss -nlp grep qemu, and connected to that port on localhost. Spicy's toggle was much easier to find: Options -> Resize guest to match window size (Checked).

This issue is due to a change in spice-vdagent whereby instead of changing the resolution directly, it instead notifies the DE to make the change, and that functionality has not been implemented yet in XFCE.

According to Installing Windows 10 in KVM + libvirt, visit Spice then scroll down to Windows binaries and then click the link spice guest tools. Proceed to install the spice tools after download completes. Once installation is complete, you should be able to get the guest VM resolution to match that of the resized VM window.

For me, "Auto resize VM with window" was greyed out until I installed the spice guest tools; I did not even have to reboot after installation - this feature was available immediately and it just worked - :).

@ThorSummoner's approach works, but if you have a high resolution monitor, the guest video driver may not have enough memory to draw the larger screen. In that case, you will need to increase the video memory, but unfortunately the virt-manager GUI doesn't provide a method to do so. So instead follow this procedure:

I also have Display set to Spice. If the VM's virtual Video hardware was set to VGA or QXL, I could not resize the desktop in the guest. When I changed Video to Virtio in virt-manager and restarted the VM, it worked.

The guest seemed stuck on 1024x768. xrandr in the guest showed lots of higher resolutions available, but when I tried to set the resolution to 1920x1080 -- whether with xrandr --output Virtual-1 --mode 1920x1080 or with Plasma's Display setting -- it would only momentarily change to the higher resolution. Then, clunk, it would change right back.

Then I changed the video hardware to Virtio, and the problem went away. I could resize the desktop with either xrandr commands or the GUI Display preferences, and the changes would stick even after restarts.

I tried everything I saw to make it work but the only thing that worked for me was to set video to QXL (didn't tried Virtio or VGA after that tho) and do a proper shutdown of the Windows 10 VM (from inside the VM, do a "shutdown"). If you use the reboot from virt-manager it seem's like it doesn't reboot entirely.

When logged into KDE Plasma (X11) as my Desktop Environment, the View / Scale Display had the "Auto-resize window with VM" option selected, but it was grayed out and KDE's resolution would not resize as I changed the guest window size; it would scale to some degree, but it seemed to be using a magnification effect rather than actually changing the resolution.

When logged into Cinnamon or into Gnome (just plain "Gnome", not "Gnome Wayland" or "Gnome on Xorg" or any of the other Gnome options in my selection pull-down menu), the View / Scale / Auto-resize was not grayed out, and both DE's resized as I resized the guest window.

In my case, I had manually set resolution to 1920x1080 prior to booting with SPICE vdagent. I just had to go to settings, display (will depend slightly between DE), and select the resolution corresponding to SPICE resize mode.

Background: I got it to auto resized before, but I got a clean install of ubuntu, and using the same config, same vm files (was actually physical partition), but I can't get it to resize again. I got spice channel in the config with QXL video, spice guest tools in windows guest, but still can get it to resize.

So finally, I just got a clean install of both windows and my distro (this is not the solution, just indicating that my config was clean). I tried again with the same config but nothing work, and I started to wonder if windows I the problem here, which it ultimately was. I checked the device manager to see that 2 virtio drivers were rejected by windows secure boot. So as an instinct I went in tiano bios (ovmf) and disable secure boot. It's working fine now.

When I first installed the VM I had the option in Windows for 3840x2160 4k resolution with the default windows driver (I think it was windows basic display adapter) however after installing Spice guest tools and installing the included drivers, the windows display resolution now maxes out at 2560x1600. My video setting on the VM configuration page says QXL and I have tried VGA and Virtio, but they just give me various lower resolutions and none have the previously available 3840x2160. How do I make 3840x2160 available again in the windows guest machine?

I have the same exact issue on ArcoLinux (as host system) with Windows 10 as VM guest and have installed spice-guest-tool-0.141.exe (2018 version), as it was the most recent available file I have found. The spice-guest-tool installation solved the problem of being finally able to obtain the copy-paste functionality between host and guest OSs, but caused the resolution issue...

I ran into something that I couldn't find an easier answer for and figured I'd post it here rather than find a specific distro wiki so I could give back something(tm) to everyone. ;) If anyone found a location explaining this topic more linearly feel free to refer to it for me so I learn to search better.I run a 3440x1440 monitor and run Gentoo with Windows VM's where I needed larger than the 2560x1600 max resolution of the standard QXL video driver. I googled (copyright curtailing verb form not proper noun...) multiple ways to do this for Ubuntu and libvirt XML but nothing for the command line. As I was about to post the question to reddit I found this:

I can confirm Andrei Stepanov's command line works after I switch fromqxl (which is also what's in the spice tools package) to the qxldoddrivers in the the virtio 0.1.141 iso. I did have to switch to thedrivers first then apply the video ram settings between reboot butthat may be anectodal or transient to my scenerio using Windows 10. Ibelieve guest support for Linux is far more straight forward with thesame QEMU parameters. You may have to expand for larger resolutions.The math for it is elsewhere in the mainstream articles/posts.

I had never known about the "-global" method of passing otherparameters to QEMU. Something for me to learn about in the futuremore. Otherwise, there is enough on the internetz already to act on alibvirt solution.. I just haven't converted over, yet. Reading up onpvpanic does lend me to move towards something more advanced when Ihave time, though.

Apparently the resolution options are governed by the VGA memory available to the guest, which defaults to 16MB. If you update that setting via virsh, you can go bigger. Updating to 64MB like in the example allows me to scale up to 4096 x 2160.

I run my virtualization workloads in libvirt but recently had a problem witha new Windows 10 guest not being able to run vdagent (screen resolutionresizing, clipboard sharing, sane mouse cursor, etc).

I tried reinstalling spice-guest-tools, but that also does not fix the issue.What is going on here? Is it possible to get spice-guest-tools working withthis setup, or should I just switch to VirtualBox or VMWare?

I'm really puzzled by this as didn't make any changes to neither guest nor host. The guest had its last windows update a week ago, and according to the pacman log, my last activities on the host were also from a week ago.