GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 678858
Installers should disable screen blanking/locking
Last modified: 2016-03-31 13:56:01 UTC
Local VMs have no advantage in doing screen blanking or screen locking (if you wanted security, use a password for the VM instead). However, the screen blanking/locking is problematic for boxes, as it makes all the icons in the collection view show all-similar black squares for thumbnails.
Would it make sense to recognize the "black screen" instead, and ignore it, so it keeps displaying previous screenshots?
Yeah, I'd also prefer an external solution as not all installations are done the express route. We don't even support it for even the most common OSs out there and we definitely will not have a complete coverage ever.
Thinking about a solution invovling the agent to inhibit screen blanking when client is connected, that might not be so difficult.
rather when client is disconnected, disable blanking :)
Does the vm ever needs to screen blank, even when connected? It seems useless to me, as the client computer will already have its own screen blanking.
Iirc at the moment screen blanking on the client is blocked while the VM window is focused because it grabs mouse and keyboard. Yet another bug to fix :(
(In reply to comment #6) > Iirc at the moment screen blanking on the client is blocked while the VM window > is focused because it grabs mouse and keyboard. Yet another bug to fix :( yeah, afaik, we won't fix it until Wayland-time. Perhaps we could ungrab after a period of inactivity? But then, this is something that was probably discussed for GtkMenu handling but they didn't chose that option. In general, it's not obvious to me whether the client should disable locking/screensaver or the guest. In Boxes case, it probably makes sense to disable it on the guest. So Spice should not prevent or inhibit client locking. (In rhevm case, where the client might not be as secure as the guest, it's probably the contrary)
At the very least, maybe the agent can tell us we're locked so that we don't take screenshots of the locked screen?
(In reply to comment #8) > At the very least, maybe the agent can tell us we're locked so that we don't > take screenshots of the locked screen? But that would mean we need to make or keep a spice main/agent connection for each VM, which is not really possible.
Marc-Andre and Christophe, Has there been any progress in spice land for this?
(In reply to comment #10) > Marc-Andre and Christophe, Has there been any progress in spice land for this? I think the solution could come from libvirt/qemu, since Boxes takes screenshots with it. There are org.freedesktop.login1.Session IdleHint properties that could be exported with qemu agent. That would not work with remote display though. Is Boxes still taking regular screenshots of background VMs?
(In reply to comment #11) > (In reply to comment #10) > > Is Boxes still taking regular screenshots of background VMs? AFAIK, yes.
Seems like this is much harder than its really worth. Please do prove me wrong.