libvirt has no support for virtio-vga yet. There is a bug for virtio-vga support in libvirt. But for the time being we need to play some tricks. Luckily libvirt has some special xml syntax to pass command line options to qemu. So here we go:


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The idea is to tell libvirt we wanna have a cirrus vga. That one has no config options, thats why it works best for our purposes. Then use the -set switch to change the emulation driver from cirrus to virtio-vga. video0 is the id libvirt assigns to the (first and only) video device.

Next level is turning on virgl & opengl support. Initially sdl and gtk user interfaces will be supported (qemu 2.5 most likely). Spice will follow later. So lets pick gtk. Here we go:


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Simliar approach: We ask libvirt for sdl support. Picking that one because libvirt will take care to pass xauth info to qemu so it gets access to the X11 display. Then use the -display switch to override the libvirt display configuration with gtk, and turn on opengl.

One final remark: On modern linux systems xauth info is stored in /run/gdm/auth-for-$USER-$RANDOM/database instead of $HOME/.Xauthority. I have a little script to copy the xauth info to a fixed place and also make it readable so libvirt can access it:

#!/bin/sh
if test "$XAUTHORITY" != "$HOME/.Xauthority"; then
    xauth extract "$HOME/.Xauthority" "$DISPLAY"
    chmod +r $HOME/.Xauthority
fi

Note that making .Xauthority world-readable effectively gives every user on your machine access to your X11 display. On your private laptop where you are the only user that should be ok, but on a shared machine you probably want do something more secure instead.