Acquire mouse and Virtual Machines

[Intaris]

I noticed a new pehnomenon today.

When using the  labview in-built mouse acquisition VIs (which allow us to monitor mouse position beyond the scope of any LV windows) I see some weird behaviour when using Virtualbox.

I have two monitors.  One monitor is showing my host OS and the other is showing a Virtualbox VM running in full screen mode with mouse integration activated.  I'm using Virtualbox 4.2.18.

If I have the following VI running on my Host machine and then moving the mouse into and out of the virtualbox monitor is fine as regards the mouse coordinates.  If I CLICK in the VM, the button stays clicked even after the mouse exits the VM window.  I need to click again outside of the VM window and release the button to get the mouse information to accurately reflect what is going on.

I presume this is more of a £Virtualbox bug than a LV bug but if anyone else using VirtualBox could check what they experience, that would be great.

Shane.

[Intaris]

Unusually enough the opposite seems to work fine.  If I click on my Host monitor, drag into the VM and release thent he change in button status IS recorded correctly.

[Intaris]

The same is observed if the VM is not full-screen mode.

[MichaelGrupp]

Hi Shane,

as far as I figured out the Acquire Input Data VI relies on DirectX, so there could well be problems when switching to the Virtual Machine. I guess you could only solve this if you knew how the mouse input is handled in / mirrored to the VM ?

What exactly were you trying to measure in the first place?

Regards,

 Michael

[Intaris]

We use the mouse functions for a few things and have noticed problems.  I had recently installed LV2012SP1 on my host PC and noticed the behaviour there.  It's not a showstopper or anything, but maybe something which could trip someone up if they don't know about it.

We have cases where the mouse functions cease to report button presses at ALL inside a Virtualbox VM.  That's most likely a Virtualbox bug I suppose but I think a lto of people use Virtualbox so it might be worth putting that information out.

Shane.

[Intaris]

Well I have now noticed this problem without the usage of a virtual machine at all.

I have the same problem on a regular basis with LV 2012 SP1 running on Windows 7 64-bit (LV is 32-bit).  I do connect to the machine via remote desktop, so maybe there's some weird aspect of how MS implements remote desktop which is throwing LV off the scent.  The one thing which VMs and RD have in common is virtualisation of the mouse.  Could it be that the LV routines are missing some activities going on in the background?

Interestingly, if I restart LabVIEW after this effect happens (No more button changes registered using the aforementioned functions) then all is well.

I have tried conencting to my PC over Remote desktop and have not been able to  specifically reproduce the issue.  I had LV running before the RD connection was made.

Of course maybe the RD or VM indication is a complete red harring.  Either way I am running more and more into the situation where I cannot monitor mouse button changes using the Input VIs.  LabVIEW internal interaction seems to work fine.

Regards

Shane.

[Intaris]

Should I start a new topic since I'm currently unsure whether the VM or RD aspects of my original phrasing are relevant at all?