P2V conversion keyboard / mouse not working on console

[klear]

OS: Debian 12
Physical Hardware: HPE Proliant Gen10

I made a P2V clone of the original system using Clonezilla across the network. Before the GUI starts up, the keyboard works, so I can interact with GRUB, for example. The VM had to be made with an EFI disk in order to work; the physical server uses UEFI to boot.

The virtual server is running, and once I managed to edit "/etc/network/interfaces", I was able to access it across the network. It runs the Java application that it is used for perfectly well. It seems to be doing everything normally, with the exception of the lack of functional keyboard and mouse on the virtual console. I can RDP into it (XRDP), and get a desktop session. SSSD services are working normally. Etc.

I removed the GUI and re-installed it. When booting without GUI at all, it works fine and the keyboard is recognized at the virtual console. I have not tried another GUI.

Checking the /dev tree for keyboard and mouse information, it seems the same as another Debian VM, which was installed on PVE, not converted from physical. I tried adding a serial device, in case that was needed, but that didn't change anything.

I wonder if somehow it hung on to the keyboard and mouse from the physical machine, but I'm not sure why that would be. Oh, I also ran a keyboard configuration with "dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration". I chose the "Generic 105-key PC" model.

There are a number of aging physical servers I would like to convert to VMs.


I would appreciate thoughts anyone might have, and troubleshooting suggestions.

 

[guruevi]

So from what I read, the keyboard/mouse is detected/working on the guest, just not on X11/Xorg. Let us know if you did anything ‘special’ with the X config before. There is a setting in Proxmox that can switch the mouse between tablet and mouse mode I think, other than that I believe it’s just emulating a USB device. I would check the Xorg config, to see if you have specified a specific type of mouse/bus from before, but typically if you leave everything ‘alone’ it ‘just works’ unless your Linux is really really old and runs XFree86.

Check if the config/mouse is detected with lsusb, any fails in dmesg or Xorg logs, but this is really a Xorg issue.

 

[klear]

I forgot to mention that qemu-guest-agent is installed, as well as associated qemu-packages.

 

[klear]

So from what I read, the keyboard/mouse is detected/working on the guest, just not on X11/Xorg. Let us know if you did anything ‘special’ with the X config before. There is a setting in Proxmox that can switch the mouse between tablet and mouse mode I think, other than that I believe it’s just emulating a USB device. I would check the Xorg config, to see if you have specified a specific type of mouse/bus from before, but typically if you leave everything ‘alone’ it ‘just works’ unless your Linux is really really old and runs XFree86.

Check if the config/mouse is detected with lsusb, any fails in dmesg or Xorg logs, but this is really a Xorg issue.

I found, over the last couple of days of working on this, that lsusb on the VMs only reports the "QEMU Tablet" and a Linux Foundation root hub. This is consistent on the P2V VM and VMs built on PVE.

There was nothing deliberately special about the X config, but I will take a look at it today. That seems like a promising idea.

As mentioned, the OS is Debian 12. Updates are applied regularly, and I updated the physical server just before the P2V process.

Ironically, I resisted installing a GUI on our Debian servers at all, but the rest of the admin team was not on board. ;-)
I reluctantly approved Cinnamon core.

 

[klear]

I have a resolution. I tried many things on this VM.

Ultimately, what I think will work if I run into this problem again, is to purge X11, Xorg, Cinnamon, and LightDM. Then re-install Cinnamon, and drop in an "/etc/X11" configuration tree taken from a working VM running Debian 12. Something got broken during the purge and Cinnamon was not able to find the display. Probably if I figured out what, specifically, was missing I could change the display setting. I have not figured that out.

Once I make some more P2V conversions, and if the problem recurs, I will try to better isolate the solution.