Host system blackscreens seemingly randomly when using Windows VM

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When I’m using my windows VM (running using QEMU / KVM), the host system sometimes blackscreens and becomes completely unresponsive and I have to kill it with the power button on my laptop. I’m using vitrio drivers in the VM in case that’s relevant.

I’ve looked into the journalctl logs of that boot, but there are no errors in sight, neither could I find anything in the libvirt logs; I’m not sure if that’s relevant, but the only log message within 90 seconds of the blackscreen was this:

wpa_supplicant[811]: wlp5s0: PMKSA-CACHE-ADDED e4:4e:2d:b2:ad:a1 0

I’ve tried messing around with the vCPU’s assigned to the VM (specifically I manually set the topology to 4 CPU’s and 2 threads which matches my OS’ topology) and that didn’t help so it’s probably not related to that.

One thing that I noticed however is, that the last 3 times it blackscreened, it happened while I was either interacting with or loading a webpage, but this might be a coincidence.

This is kind of a side thing, I don’t know much about virtualization but I did notice something that looked strange to me when configuring the display in the VM settings; currently I’m using the option “Spice server”, but when I try to change it to “VNC server”, I get the error message

Error changing VM configuration: unsupported configuration: chardev ‘spicevmc’ not supported without spice graphics

This seems a bit strange since I’m already running spice and trying to change off of it. Especially since in my video settings, the model is set to “QXL” which from what I’ve seen, spice needs to work.

Any help is much appreciated!

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I know zilch about virtualisation, but as no-one has yet replied here, perhaps this Arch Linux topic might help (or at least point you in the right direction):

virt-manager - Error removing spice graphics / Multimedia and Games / Arch Linux Forums

The 2nd post seems to contain the solution for that specific issue:

In virt-manager, goto Edit, Preferences and tick Enable XML editing. Now goto the VM you want to configure. Click on Overview and then to the right select XML. Scroll down through the XML and you will see

 <channel type="spicevmc">
    <target type="virtio" name="com.redhat.spice.0"/>
    <address type="virtio-serial" controller="0" bus="0" port="1"/>
  </channel>

highlight the text and delete. Then look for rest according to the guide, delete then click apply.

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thanks :), I’ll try it out and mess around with switching display settings, maybe that’ll help with the issue

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