Most of QEMU's PCI display device models, such as:
libvirt video/model/@type QEMU -device
------------------------- ------------
cirrus cirrus-vga
vga VGA
qxl qxl-vga
virtio virtio-vga
come with a linear framebuffer (sometimes called "VGA compatibility
framebuffer"). This linear framebuffer lives in one of the PCI device's
MMIO BARs, and allows guest code (primarily: firmware drivers, and
non-accelerated OS drivers) to display graphics with direct memory access.
Due to architectural reasons on aarch64/KVM hosts, this kind of
framebuffer doesn't / can't work in
qemu-system-(arm|aarch64) -M virt
machines. Cache coherency issues guarantee a corrupted / unusable display.
The problem has been researched by several people, including kvm-arm
maintainers, and it's been decided that the best way (practically the only
way) to have boot time graphics for such guests is to consolidate on
QEMU's "virtio-gpu-pci" device.
>From <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1195176>, libvirt
supports
<devices>
<video>
<model type='virtio'/>
</video>
</devices>
but libvirt unconditionally maps @type='virtio' to QEMU's "virtio-vga"
device model. (See the qemuBuildDeviceVideoStr() function and the
"qemuDeviceVideo" enum impl.)
According to the above, this is not right for the "virt" machine type; the
qemu-system-(arm|aarch64) binaries don't even recognize the "virtio-vga"
device model (justifiedly). Whereas "virtio-gpu-pci", which is a pure
virtio device without a compatibility framebuffer, is available, and works
fine.
(The ArmVirtQemu ("AAVMF") platform of edk2 -- that is, the UEFI firmware
for "virt" -- supports "virtio-gpu-pci", as of upstream commit
3ef3209d3028. See
<https://tianocore.acgmultimedia.com/show_bug.cgi?id=66>.)
Override the default mapping of "virtio", from "virtio-vga" to
"virtio-gpu-pci", if qemuDomainMachineIsVirt() evaluates to true.
Cc: Andrea Bolognani <abologna@redhat.com>
Cc: Drew Jones <drjones@redhat.com>
Cc: Marc-André Lureau <marcandre.lureau@redhat.com>
Cc: Martin Kletzander <mkletzan@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Marc-André Lureau <marcandre.lureau@redhat.com>
Resolves: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1372901
Signed-off-by: Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Martin Kletzander <mkletzan@redhat.com>
Laszlo Ersek