[vfio-users] alternative to input passthrough

[Will Marler]

Hey Jose,

In my experience, Synergy is more than good enough for a 1st-person shooter
as far as latency goes. I ran into other problem. It seems like when a game
takes over full-screen in Windows, the mapping of one unit of movement of
the mouse to one unit of movement on the screen becomes ... funky. For me,
Skyrim was the best example. In Skyrim, one fractional physical move of my
mouse moved the cursor 150 or 200 pixels on the screen. This made the game
unplayable. I've experienced the same thing in Bioshock Infinite and Metro
2033 to varying degrees. For those latter 2 games I was able to get the
games playable enough using mouse sensitivity settings (in Windows and in
the games themselves), but for Skyrim I wasn't (granted, I didn't try as
hard with Skyrim).

Another problem I've had is that Synergy seems to be bounded by a box, when
playing a full screen game. What I mean by that is that when I use the
mouse to turn the character, it will only go so far. As if the character
can only turn his head so far to the left. This happens both left, right,
up, and down. It's not a dealbreaker when playing the single-player FPS's
that I mentioned, but I imagine it would be if you were playing something
competitively multiplayer.

The third problem I had was when I was using Windows 7. For some reason,
Windows 7 would decided it couldn't boot, and go into a recovery mode. This
recovery mode would require a keypress or mouse clicks to exit; once exited
the VM would boot just fine. Unfortunately, Synergy wouldn't be running at
this stage, so passing through a USB mouse directly was the only option.
Windows 10 has yet to give me this problem.

Passing through a USB mouse is very easy using virt-manager. It can be done
on the fly, with a running VM, and it has the advantage of Windows
detecting it (I have a gaming mouse with a number of buttons and settings
and Windows picks all this up when the mouse is passed through directly,
but doesn't when Synergy is involved). The downside, of course, is that
once you click "apply," you no longer have use of that mouse in your host :
). For that, I have a 2nd mouse, whose purpose is simply to interact with
the host, if that is necessary, while the guest is running. I still am
using Synergy for the Keyboard.

Will

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 9:45 PM, Jose Ramon Muñoz Pekkarinen <
koalinux at gmail.com> wrote:

>     Hi Andrew,
>
>     Thanks for your answer! I didn't know about the arch wiki you pointed.
> It's yet another great resource from the arch community.
>
>      I have a couple of questions though. Is synergy responsive enough to
> play something time demanding, lets say a shooter? Is there any way to
> avoid using the bridged mode networking?
>
>      Thanks!
>
>      José.
> ------------------------------
> From: Andrew Morgan <andrew.morgan4453 at gmail.com>
> Sent: ‎15/‎08/‎2015 14:27
> To: vfio-users at redhat.com
> Subject: Re: [vfio-users] alternative to input passthrough
>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA512
>
> Check out Synergy, it allows control of the mouse and keyboard input
> without having to passthrough the devices. Guide here:
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Control_VM_via_Synergy
>
> - -------
>
>         Hi,
>
>         I'm using vga passthrough so much nowadays, and I wonder if there
> is any
>     better option than passing through the usb devices to the machine,
> like using
>     vnc, or the brand new virtio keyboard and mouse coming in 2.4 version.
>
>         The setup in my case is working quite well but from time to time,
> the vm
>     hangs without any option to go back to the host, and I'd like to
> improve this
>     at some point.
>
>         Best regards.
>
>         José.
>
>
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