[clug] KVM & Virt-Manager

[George at Clug]

    Does anyone use KVM and Virt-Manager to host Guest VMs on their
Linux desktop computer?   I have been for the past six or so months.


I ha​ve found that KVM as a Hypervisor works quite well. However
when I create a Cinnamon Guest and log in, the system reports "Running
in software rendering mode", "Cinnamon is currently running without
video hardware acceleration and, as a result, you may observe much
higher than normal CPU usage".

Now I suspect few people bother to run guest VMs with a Desktop
Environment, and in particularly with Cinnamon or with Gnome. 
Hopefully though there will be at least a few people who do (or at
least have tried).

As per one of my previous emails, VMware Workstation can emulate video
hardware acceleration good enough for Cinnamon to believe it is
running on true hardware.

Searching the Internet I have found reports that suggest this is not
currently possible, some reports suggest it is with virgil3d, but as
yet this project is not packaged with Debian as yet, and then there
are reports of "gl='yes'" and "accel3d='yes' accel2d='yes".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine
"Video card [1] Cirrus CLGD 5446 PCI VGA card, dummy VGA card with
Bochs [2] VESA [3] extensions, or Virgil [4] as a virtual 3D GPU"

I have tested the below two configurations for my test Guest VM, but
they do not appear to work the way I expect them. Have you any
experience with these settings and knowledge of what they actually do,
and any conditions (hardware or software) that must be met for them to
be used, please do let us know.

    
  
    
      
        
      
      
    

If you do not understand why I want to run a Cinnamon Linux
installation as a guest VM, do not worry, it is just a particular idea
that I have for testing various GUIs (i.e. Desktop Environments
without needing separate physical computers.

Regards, George.



Links:
------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_card
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochs
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgil_%28software%29&action=edit&redlink=1