Arch Linux

paulhart

Member

Registered: 2020-01-08

Posts: 9

QEMU, Wayland, and WinXP Guest - Touchscreen?

Hi, this is a bit of a niche challenge, but here goes...

I'm attempting to transition off of VirtualBox for... reasons. my guest OS isn't receiving touch inputs though, which is very helpful for my use case.

I'm running:

• Hardware: Lenovo X1 Carbon 7th gen

• Arch with 6.16.4-arch1-1 and all packages updated

• Wayland

• 32-bit Windows XP SP3 guest

My QEMU command is:

qemu-system-i386 -M pc-i440fx-10.1,usb=on,acpi=on,hpet=off \
  -m 4G \
  -cpu host \
  -smp 2 \
  -accel kvm \
  -drive if=virtio,file=winxp.qcow2 \
  -device usb-tablet \
  -device virtio-vga,xres=1280,yres=720 \
  -device AC97 \
  -nic user,model=virtio \
  -monitor stdio \
  -full-screen

I've tried a variety of variations on the above:

• Changing the display from virtio-vga to VGA continues to ignore the touchscreen inputs (and with VGA I need to toggle in and out of full screen to get QEMU to correctly scale the display)

• Changing the machine to q35 causes the guest to bluescreen on install due to ACPI issues (these can be avoided by pressing F7 during the install process, but then you need to manually quit QEMU when you shut the guest down, as it just shows a "you may now turn off your computer" splash screen at shutdown)

• Edit to add: I've also installed the QXL driver (needed to change line 22 the qxl.inf file to have uppercase hex characters so it would identify correctly), but I'm seeing the same issues as with VGA regarding incorrect scaling and it doesn't change the touchscreen event handling

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Last edited by paulhart (2025-09-06 14:15:06)

sipak

Member

Registered: 2019-02-03

Posts: 50

Re: QEMU, Wayland, and WinXP Guest - Touchscreen?

Make sure to add "EvTouch USB Graphics Tablet" as device in qemu. Try virt-manager for a handy graphical manager.

Then make sure WinXP has the drivers for it... does WinXP support touch at all tho?

---

A problem to do what everybody else does without questioning. A danger to go against the way things are just because. Too much or too little, ivory towers of perfection or functional mess... Balance is what this world needs. Selective, not the middle ground. Objectivity and idealism, but within a pragmatic scope. - Minimalism is achieved through efficiency, not deficiency.

sipak

Member

Registered: 2019-02-03

Posts: 50

Re: QEMU, Wayland, and WinXP Guest - Touchscreen?

<input type="tablet" bus="usb">
  <address type="usb" bus="0" port="1"/>
</input>

---

A problem to do what everybody else does without questioning. A danger to go against the way things are just because. Too much or too little, ivory towers of perfection or functional mess... Balance is what this world needs. Selective, not the middle ground. Objectivity and idealism, but within a pragmatic scope. - Minimalism is achieved through efficiency, not deficiency.

Vamp898

Member

Registered: 2009-01-03

Posts: 1,032

Website

Re: QEMU, Wayland, and WinXP Guest - Touchscreen?

Also, KVM does not work when you're using qemu-system-i386 so you will use Software Emulation.

When you use KVM, the Guest has to use the same architecture as the hosts kernel module. When you check in the QEMU Terminal with info kvm, it will probably show disabled.

Your Arch is probably x86_64, that is an mismatch

I know that is unrelated to your touchscreen problem, sorry for the off-topic but you might not be aware of this and be wondering, as soon touchscreen works, why everything is so hellish slow. QEMU will use Software Emulation for the CPU.

You have to use a different Hypervisor like VirtualBox if you want to use the extension for Hardware Accelerated VMs in that combo

So even if unrelated to your initial issue, it might safe you time troubleshooting the next one that might follow.

Also when you're using btrfs, make sure to disable CoW on the folder/image files of the VM, otherwise HDD performance will be very slow too. And remember, that disabling CoW only affects newly written files. So you either have to set it on the folder (with recursion) and then cp the file or create a new, empty file, disable CoW on that and the cp the content. But you have to cp the image, otherwise it will not get into affect.

Last edited by Vamp898 (2025-09-10 16:11:21)