[Qemu-devel] Dual monitor support

[James Pellow]

Hi All,

Recently I have been playing around with various virtualization products to 
fit my current needs.  I have used qemu and kqemu casually many times in the 
past, but never used it for anything real serious.  At  this point I need to 
be able to run win2k in a virutal machine.  Everything works perfectly except 
video.  Here is what I need:

I am running an nvidia card in dual head twinview mode.  For those without an 
nvidia card, twinview mode gives the os a logical view of the combined 
displays, so blits are not required when dragging from on screen to the 
other, etc.  The upshot is, my full screen mode is 2560x1024.  While that 
mode is quite common these days, I don't see it as one of the offered vesa 
modes available in qemu with either the VGA or Cirrus hardware.

So, what I have tried:

I tried the normal video mode registry hack to set the video mode manually, 
but discovered neither supported virtual cards had enough ram to support the 
required mode, so I found in the qemu source where the video ram was 
specified and changed it to 32M.  It looks like the cirrus card is fixed at 
4M because of hardware design limitations...  but the standard VGA card 
should work, right?  At this point, I was able to set much higher video 
modes, but the display defaulted to one of the standard vesa modes.  If I set 
a non-standard mode in the registry, windows would select a standard mode 
that fit most closely to what I specified.  It didn't seem possible to 
specify 2560x1024.

Is this a problem with the default VGA driver in windows 2000?  Or is this 
something that could be fixed in the qemu emulated hardware?  I tried XP, as 
it is supposed to have a better VGA driver, but I could not download the 
driver.  Networking doesn't seem to work in XP (another problem).

Qemu version 0.9.0
Kqemu:  1.3.0pre9

Host:  Ubuntu 6.10 i386.

If the solution is simple I would be happy to look at the code and take a stab 
at it.  I don't have much time to spend on it, but pointers in the right 
direction would help.

Cheers,

James

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
James Pellow, President
Alent Design Solutions
www.alentdesignsolutions.com
509-522-5010
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