Adjust Hyper-V Keyboard Latency

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I have found that copy/paste from my host machine into a Hyper-V instance is not working consistently. The issue is specific to physical copy/paste buttons on my keyboard as opposed to using a two key combination of CTRL+C or CTRL+V. It's also specific to the Hyper-V Manager, not a RDP connection.

My host machine is Windows 10 Pro (i7 CPU, 24GB RAM, SSDs; it's a development machine). I have a Windows 10 Pro VM running locally on HyperV. Performance of both host and VM is excellent. However I am having this one problem with keyboard latency that I can't figure out to to address.

My keyboard is a Kinesis Freestyle 2 which has physical cut/copy/paste buttons just to the left of my left pinky finger. The ergonomics of this keyboard are great! Up until recently I used VMWare for all my virtual machine needs but my company has just switched over to using Hyper-V instead.

When my VM has focus and I press one of the physical buttons like paste it consistently fails 75% of the time and instead of pasting my buffer I am left with a "v" character instead. (Or if I press copy whatever text I had selected is replaced by "c"). It will always succeed within 4 attempts, but sometimes not until the 4th try vs. sometimes it'll be the 1st or 2nd.

I believe there is no single scancode for copy/paste/etc so the keyboard is essentially emulating two codes: CTRL followed by a c. The VM seems to be missing the CTRL press or perhaps there is a gap between the CTRL and the c such that the VM thinks the CTRL press is done (instead of being held) by the time the c arrives..?

I have had three versions of the Freestyle keyboard over the past decade and never once had any issues with these buttons on physical hosts or using VMWare locally or vSphere network consoles or even through RDP. I know VMWare allows you to adjust the "keyboard hook timeout" but I never needed to do this. I can't find any similar settings in Hyper-V.

On my Logitech mouse I mapped one button to copy and one button to paste, which I imagine would work the same way emulating multiple scancodes. This works flawlessly in every situation I've tried. Perhaps the mouse driver sends the scancodes more rapidly than the keyboard driver?

What do I need to tweak to get the keyboard buttons to work in Hyper-V? Is there a registry setting I can tweak, or a Hyper-V virtual BIOS setting to change or some other low level tweak I might be able to try to fix this?

wweicker

Posted 2020-01-22T23:19:42.670

Reputation: 221

No answers