[vfio-users] alternative to input passthrough

[Will Marler]

Thanks Andrew, I'll revisit those options. It's been a while since I
decided to just pass through the mouse directly, and I forget exactly which
ones I tried. And, naturally, I didn't take careful notes.

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 11:27 PM, Andrew Morgan <andrew.morgan4453 at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Hey Will,
>
> I'm unable to test those symptoms on my own instance (a future post will
> explain why), however there's a couple features of Synergy that you
> might want to know about that may help you and others.
>
> The mouse can be locked to a particular screen using scoll-lock,
> preventing it from escaping to a different monitor. Additionally, one
> can enable the " relativeMouseMoves" option on the server, setting the
> speed of the mouse relative to the current OS. Rumor has it that running
> Synergy in elevated mode also allows the mouse to move once it reaches
> the edge of the screen.
>
> Check out the Synergy User Guide for more info:
> https://github.com/synergy/synergy/wiki/User-Guide
>
> As you mentioned Will, virt-manager's feature of passing the USB device
> in on the fly is quite useful, however in the situation that you perhaps
> want to play a game, pause, then change your music on your Host OS, and
> go back to your game, passing through the USB devices makes this much
> more of a hassle. Synergy seems to handle this as if the two OS's were
> simply two monitors of the same OS.
>
> As a sidenote, Synergy seems to work best in an environment where you
> have your Host OS and Guest VM running on separate monitors at the same
> time. If you are in the situation where each of your graphics card
> outputs feed into different inputs of a single monitor, USB passthrough
> is probably more ideal as you'll only ever be seeing a single OS at a time.
>
> Andrew Morgan
>
> On 8/15/15 10:13 PM, Will Marler wrote:
> > 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
> <mailto: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
> <mailto:andrew.morgan4453 at gmail.com> >     Sent: ‎15/‎08/‎2015 14:27
> >     To: vfio-users at redhat.com <mailto:vfio-users at redhat.com> >
> Subject: Re: [vfio-users] alternative to input passthrough > >
> > 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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>
>
>
>
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