Poor video performance, Xorg Out of Memory, and Xorg Out of Surfaces in Linux virtual machines

Issue

• Video performance of the qxl video drivers with Spice console on Linux virtual machines is poor. We see issues when:

  • Moving windows around and looking at the "lag" between mouse movements and window movement
  • Typing in the browser / office package / programming IDE
  • Loading a Flash/image heavy website and scrolling through it
  • Looking at YouTube videos using the Flash plugin and HTML5 playback

• This is seen in Linux guests, both RHEL 6.3 and Fedora 17 using the qxl video drivers.

• In /var/log/Xorg.0.log the following errors are seen:

[   490.320] - 2th attempt
[   490.320] - OOM at 117 946 24
[   490.320] Cache contents:  null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null
null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null null
null null null null null null null null null null  937  693  875  946  710  768  845  909  879  901  993  985  986
945     total: 14

Then many instances of:

[ 91809.027]   Out of surfaces