Cirrus is obsolete, the hardware was designed in the 90ies
and can't keep up with todays needs. More background:
https://www.kraxel.org/blog/2014/10/qemu-using-cirrus-considered-harmful/
Better alternatives are:
- stdvga (DRM_BOCHS, qemu -vga std, default in qemu 2.2+)
- qxl (DRM_QXL, qemu -vga qxl, works best with spice)
- virtio (VIRTIO_GPU), qemu -vga virtio)