Dummy QEMU Clipboard Sharing

Features • Usage • Installation • License •

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dqcs is a handy little tool for those who love QEMU but find themselves cursing the SPICE (performance issues). After stumbling upon SDL, I was amazed. No glitches, smooth as butter, nearly perfect. The only catch? No clipboard sharing... yet. So, I whipped up this quick-and-dirty fix using virtio-serial to fill that gap until SDL adds native clipboard support. Enjoy! Or don't. But I think you should at least try.

⚡ Features

The structure of the project is pretty simple:

• a component that runs on the host
• a component that runs on the guest
• a virtio-serial device for the communication between the two components.

The following is a list of the features (both planned and implemented):

• Allow bidirectional copy between Linux host and Linux guest
• Allow bidirectional copy between Linux host and Windows guest
• Allow image clipboard sharing
• Add GUI with systray to show logs and status

📚 Usage

dqcs -h

This will display the help for the tool

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v0.1.0 - https://github.com/thelicato/dqcs

Dummy QEMU Clipboard Sharing for those who don't like SPICE

Usage:
  dqcs [flags]
  dqcs [command]

Available Commands:
  guest       Run the DQCS host component
  help        Help about any command
  host        Run the DQCS host component

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for dqcs

Use "dqcs [command] --help" for more information about a command.

The help is pretty self-explainatory, the correct order is the following:

1. Run dqcs host
2. Start QEMU with a virtio-serial device
3. Run dqcs guest in the QEMU VM

Configure QEMU

The following options are needed in your QEMU start command to make things work:

  -device virtio-serial \
  -chardev socket,path=<CHANGEME>,id=clipboard \
  -device virtserialport,chardev=clipboard,name=com.dqcs.clipboard

The path value needs to be set accordingly with the path specified when running the dqcs host command. Currently the name of the virtserialport device is hardcoded to com.dqcs.clipboard (could be customizable in the future).

Linux Service Setup

Here is a sample Linux service that you can use to automate the usage:

[Unit]
Description=dqcs
After=graphical-session.target
Wants=graphical-session.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/dqcs guest
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10
User=root
Environment=PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
Environment=DISPLAY=:1
Environment=XAUTHORITY=/run/user/1000/gdm/Xauthority
WorkingDirectory=/root

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

To create a Linux service:

1. Create a dqcs.service file in /etc/systemd/system with the above content
2. Reload the available service with systemctl daemon-reload
3. Start the dqcs.service with systemctl start dqcs
4. Check the current status of the service with systemctl status dqcs
5. Enable autostart with systemctl enable dqcs

Windows Setup

Even though the tool is built to support Windows services the clipboard does not seem to be updated when running as a Service. For this reason I'm just running it as a Scheduled Task.

Is it ugly? Definitely. Does it work? Hell yeah.

A solution could be to either fix the Windows Service or build a light GUI and keep it in the systray.

🚀 Installation

Run the following command to install the latest version:

go install github.com/thelicato/dqcs@latest

Or you can simply grab an executable from the Releases page.

🪪 License

dqcs is made with 🖤 and released under the MIT LICENSE.