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Host: Debian Bullseye
Guest: Windows 10 20H2
Hypervisor Details:

Hypervisor: KVM
Architecture: x86_64
Emulator: /usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64
Chipset: Q35
Firmware: BIOS

Windows in the VM is running well, but I notice that the Spice Agent process is constantly eating up a whole CPU core on the system. Despite all that "work", neither shared clipboard, nor auto-resizing work. Virt-manager says the Spice Agent cannot be detected on the guest.

Deciding to investigate the Services, I look for any services with SPICE, KVM and/or QEMU in their name. I find that the Spice VDAgent service is running, but the QEMU Guest Agent is not running, despite being set to Automatic. When I try to start it, it fails, saying

Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion

When I try to run the executable for that service manually in cmd (C:\Program Files\qemu-ga\qemu-ga.exe), it blurts out the following

1646973410.401573: critical: error opening path
1646973410.401573: critical: error opening channel
1646973410.401573: critical: failed to create guest agent channel
1646973410.401573: critical: failed to initialize guest agent channel

After some googling I discover this output is due to the QEMU Guest Agent being unable to find a channel. I don't really know what that is, but, under Virtual Hardware Details, I did notice that the Channel spice device has been set to com.redhat.spice.0. So I tried to replace it with a Channel org.qemu.guest_agent.0. But after doing so, the VM fails to start, saying that org.qemu.guest_agent.0 is an Unsupported spicevmc target name. Setting it back to the RedHat setting lets the VM start again, but the problem with spice-guest-tools persists.

I tried reinstalling spice-guest-tools, but that also does not fix the issue. What is going on here? Is it possible to get spice-guest-tools working with this setup, or should I just switch to VirtualBox or VMWare?

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  • How did you install the guest additions? How does your device manager look like?
    – mashuptwice
    Commented Mar 14, 2022 at 5:11

1 Answer 1

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2

I've ran into the same issue and after a lot of testing, I've managed to find the issue.

Make sure your vm has the following components:

  • Video: QXL
  • Graphic: Spice server
  • Channel: spacevmc
  • controller: virtio-serial
  • network: virtio
  • drivers: Spice guest-tools, virtio driver (very important)

I hope it helped!

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  • It you have time, it would be quite useful to have the command output of your virt-manager (not sure if ps aux | grep qemu would work) for people who otherwise use the command-line flags. Thanks whether or not you do this.
    – user76871
    Commented Jan 25 at 22:12

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