QXL/spice is not especially straightforward at the moment, and may not work in your desired software/hardware enVironment. The project is actively developed, but not very actively documented. If you are working with windows-guestOSes, or having trouble with the brief instructions at the site, see here - (but beware both the wiki and the main site are WOEFULLY out-of-date with many pages from 2009 through 2012, so tread carefully). I wasn't prompted to add the channel, as the page claims, but it wasn't hard to add manually. , scroll down to 'Enabling SPICE using virt-manager'. There are limitations on what sort of installations are supported by QXL/spice, but if your system(s) can use them, they are recommended for improved 2D and video-playback. It also helps to add the 'channel' to your VM for spice-vdagent running inside the guest, which allows you to cut-n-paste data in between guestOS apps and hostOS apps pretty decently.īesides offering high resolutions, the QXL/spice setup was a big improvement over the Cirrus/VNC setup when watching videos in the guestOS - I actually got some thermal-trip warnings from the CPU when attempting to watch fullscreen videos in 1024x768 Cirrus/VNC, but the laptop ran cool and the fans were quiet when doing fullscreen 1920x1080 video with the more-efficient QXL/spice option. Once everything was working, and all guestOS (and hostOS) software updates had been applied, I used virt-manager to change from vnc-display to spice-graphics, and from cirrus-video to QXL-video.

In my case, I created the VM using virt-install, put the OS on the vHDD using the normal vnc-style control and the normal cirrus-vGPU. This can be configured from your virt-manager GUI settings (or of course from CLI args). As of 2014, if you want to get better than the 1024x768 resolution offered by the Cirrus vGPU, and you are running KVM as your hypervisor on an x86_64 hostOS platform, you should look into using the QXL vGPU driver in the guestOS, coupled with the spice-server display.

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