11.1-REL in a VM (KVM-QEMU), no copy/paste in VT (moused, vidcontrol...)

[Nat Makarevitch]

I booted a a KVM-QEMU VM with the FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64.qcow2 image. The VM has nothing special, it provides the default Spice-QXL-Generic PS2 Mouse in "relative Movement" setup, its hypervisor runs on a Linux amd64 box.

Problem: I can't see the mouse pointer in any virtual terminal (no X needed), nor copy/paste thanks to the mouse. I moved the mouse, tried to select then paste at random (without seeing the mouse pointer), it didn't select nor paste anything.

There is an active 'moused' processus which probably receives mouse data because if I kill it then invoke "moused -p /dev/psm0 -f -d" it outputs that there is a "ps/2" mouse type "sysmouse" model "IntelliMouse Explorer" (the physical device is a Dell MS116), and when I move the mouse or press on a button, there are pertinent events traces.

Actions taken (in vain):

• 'vidcontrol -m on' and before/after invoking moused
• letting the VM keep full focus during a complete reboot in order to cope with some potential initialization-related mishap
• updating ('freesbsd-update fetch', 'freesbsd-update install', reboot), uname -a now spits "11.1-RELEASE-p4"
• putting '"moused_enable="YES"' or "moused_enable="NO"' in /etc/rc.conf (then rebooting), same with 'allscreens_flags="-m on"'

Maybe related:

• 'vidcontrol -i adapter' produces "Inappropriate ioctl for the device'.
• 'vidmode -i mode' produces an empty list (nothing after the usual "mode# flags type..." header)

I then installed a new VM (same setup) with the disc1 image (including moused). Same problem, same actions, same (absence of) results.

Thank you.

 

[tobik@]

vt(4) is now the default console and it only supports the mouse in graphics mode, but defaults to text mode when running in a VM.

Two possible solutions come to mind. Either switch to graphics mode with

hw.vga.textmode=0

in /boot/loader.conf or switch to the old console sc(4) with

kern.vty=sc