Once again I found myself trying to “fix” something that has been bothering me for some time – the Resolution in KVM guests is sometimes poor, as low as 800×600.
As it turns out, one can increase the resolution of the guests much higher by using a custom xorg.conf and the std vga driver.
Save the following in /etc/X11/xorg.conf in the Guest OS.
Direct download – bodhi.zazen’s kvm xorg.conf
As root run:
wget http://bodhizazen.net/adblock/kvm.xorg.conf -O /etc/X11/xorg.conf
xorg.conf
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "BodhiZazen’s KVM xorg.conf"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "record"
Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "glx"
Load "dbe"
Load "dri2"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "vmmouse"
Option "Protocol" "SysMouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
HorizSync 20.0 – 50.0
VertRefresh 40.0 – 80.0
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "vesa"
VendorName "Cirrus Logic"
BoardName "GD 5446"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Modes "1600×1200"
EndSubSection
EndSection
Note: The vmware mouse driver is installed on most distros by default. If you need to install it use:
# Fedora
yum install xorg-x11-drv-vmmouse
#Debian / Ubuntu
apt-get install xorg-input-vmmouse
If you need a higher/lower resolution, change “1600×1200″ to your desired resolution.
Finally, when we restart KVM use the “std” video driver. The default video driver is cirrus.
kvm -m 512 -vga std -disk file=/path/to/linux.qcow,cache=writeback,media=disk
You may specify vga from Virtmanager or in your guest xml file (if you are using libvirt).
<model type='vga' vram='9216' heads='1'/>
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Excellent article, this was exactly my problem I googled a few days ago. Thanks!