KVM: copy from guest and paste into host not working

Support Virtualization
42

I almost included that, and should have. There are scenarios I need it as well. And in all my guests (without a passed through GPU).

waypipe attempts hardware acceleration for decoding and encoding video, this is how it can get much more fast and responsive compared to X11, under most conditions. And for some reason, it just doesn’t work at all when it hiccups, and you need that --no-gpu flag. Encoding is always the harder one to do, and the support for codecs depends on the age and quality of the GPU.

waypipe will try to attempt to use the method suited to the conditions, and at least with VMs you have great network throughput. So even without hardware acceleration, it runs fairly decent.

If it wasn’t apparent before, waypipe goes both ways. So you can go from your host to your guest, and you can try it without --no-gpu, coming from the host. (If that even works for what you want to do.)

You need a GPU with fully working drivers for this. And Intel integrated type stuff usually can usually decode stuff around its era, but not encode.

You can load single apps, or your whole DE!

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43

Possibly nothing - it is how it is.

I have been playing with the common desktops in virtual environment, to see if I could find what is causing Gnome to share guest clipboard with host.

I created three guests (Gnome (Wayland), Plasma (Wayland), Xfce (X11)).

While a Gnome guest will happily stream the clipboard back to the host, I have not been able to make Xfce and Plasma guests do the same, despite identical virtual machine settings and the same services present.

Even Gnome guest will stream the clipboard to the host - making copy paste into a forum topic work - it is not possible to copy the same data into the Xfce guest, even the same data can be pasted into the Plasma guest.

To me it appears to be entirely random, whether the clipboard will work or not (supported by my initial test (not reproducible).

Such challenges is quite rewarding, in the sense that they make us seek out other paths to achieve the goal at hand :slight_smile:

Host system

Plasma using Wayland (X11 not tested)

Operating System: Manjaro Linux 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.1
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.23.0
Qt Version: 6.10.2
Kernel Version: 6.18.13-1-MANJARO (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland

Packages installed

  • virt-manager
  • qemu-desktop

User is member has additional membership of libvirt-qemu, libvirt and kvm groups. I don’t remember if all is necessary, the mention is purely for documentation.

Enabled services host

 $ systemctl list-unit-files | grep libvirtd
libvirtd.service                                    enabled         disabled
libvirtd-admin.socket                               enabled         disabled
libvirtd-ro.socket                                  enabled         disabled
libvirtd-tcp.socket                                 disabled        disabled
libvirtd-tls.socket                                 disabled        disabled
libvirtd.socket                                     enabled         disabled

New virtual machine

When you create a new virtual machine using Virtual Machine Manager, these communication channels are created

  • Serial 1
  • Channel (qemu-ga)
  • Channel (spice)

Manjaro guest installation default

When you install Manjaro in a virtual environment, mhwd installs the following packages

  • spice-vdagent
  • qemu-guest-agent

Enabled services guest

 $ systemctl list-unit-files | grep qemu
qemu-guest-agent.service                     static          -

 $ systemctl list-unit-files | grep spice
spice-vdagentd.service                       static          -
spice-vdagentd.socket                        static          -
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44

Thanks a lot.
I’ll survive with this situation and wait things changes

45

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