Mouse And Display Issues With Windows 10 Guest

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Anyone managed to get a Windows 10 guest running well under qemu/kvm?
I can get it up and running, but there is a major issue with losing use of the mouse, plus my display resolution is stuck at 1024×768.

The mouse will work for a short time (a few seconds to a few minutes), but then stops responding. That’s with the mouse coming in as the recommended QEMU tablet device. I can assign a USB mouse to the guest as a USB host device, but it also stops responding after a short time. At least with the USB mouse I can remove it from the guest and then reassign it again. That gives me use of the mouse, but again only for a short time. Trying run Windows 10 from just a keyboard is an exercise in frustration.

I can’t get Windows 10 to believe that any screen resolution besides
1024×768 is available. That’s the case both with VNC/vga and Spice/qxl. This is in contrast with Windows 7, which offers a good selection of resolutions with VNC/vga.

Any suggestions or success reports would be appreciated.

5 thoughts on - Mouse And Display Issues With Windows 10 Guest

  • What’s the host OS?

    I enjoy Windows 8.1 (virtio/qxl) on CentOS 7.2 laptop (the one I’m writing now on).

    Best regards, Dmitry Mikhaylov

  • CentOS 6.7. Sorry I forgot to mention that.

    As I said, Windows 7 runs just fine in a couple of VMs.

    One thing I haven’t tried is removing the virtio drivers that got carried over in the Windows 7 -> 10 upgrade. I haven’t found any virtio drivers labeled for use with Windows 10. (How the heck you uninstall a driver that’s no longer associated with any device is going to take a bit of searching.)

  • Perhaps I’ll give that a try, but eliminating the virtio drivers by switching back to IDE disks, uninstalling the balloon driver, etc., didn’t improve things at all.

    I had some problems initially with Windows Update, but that’s resolved now, and everything else seems to work. But, with a
    1024×768 screen and no mouse, there’s not much you can do with it besides saying, “See, it runs!”

  • > Anyone managed to get a Windows 10 guest running well under
    > qemu/kvm? I can get it up and running, but there is a major issue
    > with losing use of the mouse, plus my display resolution is stuck at
    > 1024×768.
    >
    > The mouse will work for a short time (a few seconds to a few
    > minutes), but then stops responding. That’s with the mouse coming in
    > as the recommended QEMU tablet device. I can assign a USB mouse to
    > the guest as a USB host device, but it also stops responding after a
    > short time. At least with the USB mouse I can remove it from the
    > guest and then reassign it again. That gives me use of the mouse, but
    > again only for a short time. Trying run Windows 10 from just a
    > keyboard is an exercise in frustration.
    >
    > I can’t get Windows 10 to believe that any screen resolution besides
    > 1024×768 is available. That’s the case both with VNC/vga and
    > Spice/qxl. This is in contrast with Windows 7, which offers a good
    > selection of resolutions with VNC/vga.

    Well, I got the mouse problem solved. I finally ran across
    <http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/131942/qemu-2-0-windows-guest-mouse-stops-working-vnc-when-using-usb-passthrough>
    and followed the instructions to go into the power settings for the tablet device and remove the check mark on “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power.” Presto! No more mouse problems.

    I’ve still got to figure out how to get a display bigger than
    1024×768, but fiddling with that should be a lot easier with a working mouse.