On 10/25/2018 09:37 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 10:52:56AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
While being at it deprecate cirrus too.
Reason (short version): use stdvga instead. Verbose version: https://www.kraxel.org/blog/2014/10/qemu-using-cirrus-considered-harmful
Every single one of my guests is using cirrus. This wasn't an explicit choice on my part, so I believe it is being used as the default in virt-install.
virt-manager/virt-install 2.0.0 will never explicitly set cirrus, but that release is quite new. The previous release's default for x86 was roughly: if using spice graphics: use qxl elif guest os is windows: use vga else: use cirrus It was definitely sub optimal. Maybe your virt-install commands were explicitly setting --graphics vnc which would trigger cirrus in that case.
I don't debate the points in the blog post above that stdvga is a better choice, but I don't think that's enough to justify deprecating cirrus at this point in time, because when it then gets deleted it will break way too many existing deployments.
We need to socialize info in that blog post above more widely and especially ensure that apps are not using that by default. I don't see it being viable to formally deprecate it in QEMU any time soon though given existing usage.