Changes between Version 3 and Version 4 of Guest_resizing

Timestamp:

Oct 12, 2016 3:24:02 PM (8 years ago)

Author:

Michael Thayer

Comment:

--

Guest_resizing

@@ -11 +11 @@
 == Resize requests from the host ==
 
-The !VirtualBox graphics card has a mechanism to transmit resize requests from the host to the guest operating system.  Generally the Guest Additions graphics driver tells the guest that a monitor of the given size has been plugged into the matching monitor output.  If automatic resizing is enabled, the when the user directly or indirectly resizes a virtual machine screen window on the host system (an example of indirect resizing would be a window manager adjusting the size) the graphical interface sends one of these "size hints" to the guest.  The expected result is that the guest operating system will almost immediately resize that output to the size requested.  The user interface will see that the new output size matches the window's size and will not attempt to change it.
+The !VirtualBox graphics card has a mechanism to transmit resize requests from the host to the guest operating system.  Generally the Guest Additions graphics driver tells the guest that a monitor of the given size has been plugged into the matching monitor output.  If automatic resizing is enabled, then when the user directly or indirectly resizes a virtual machine screen window on the host system (an example of indirect resizing would be a window manager adjusting the size) the graphical interface sends one of these "size hints" to the guest.  The expected result is that the guest operating system will almost immediately resize that output to the size requested.  The user interface will see that the new output size matches the window's size and will not attempt to change it.
 
 In theory the guest could decide to set a slightly different size, perhaps just by one or two pixels, and the host could try to insist on the original one, but in practice this has not been observed.  What is more common is that the guest ignores the request for some reason - for example if the user has accidentally told GNOME Shell in a guest that they only want a certain resolution.  Another known problem is that on older Linux guests without kernel graphics drivers we send an ACPI monitor change notification, which a few older guests interpret as a request to cycle to the next available resolution after the resize has already taken place.  No modern Linux system is known to be affected, and as of X.Org Server 1.19 in the guest we require use of the kernel driver.