[Spice-devel] Our current open issues

[Yaniv Kaul]

On 07/20/2011 05:31 AM, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> Hello, all.  I know I've raised a large number of issues over the last
> few weeks most of which are still open.  I'd like to summarize them here
> and ask for your direction on how we can further troubleshoot and
> resolve them, in other words, how can we as integrators rather than
> programmers help.
>
> The bottom line is that SPICE is much slower than RDP for accessing the
> same Windows guest and it is not only orders of magnitude slower than
> X2Go for accessing Linux guests, it is not even usable.  It is quite
> possible we have mangled the installation but we have tried to be
> careful and have stuck primarily with Fedora 15 to make our installation
> as much "out of the box" as possible.  Here are the specifics:

I'd like to suggest you open bugs on each issues, so they can be 
identified and tracked by all.
I know you have opened on some, but having the ability to talk about bug 
XYZ is easier than 'Linux guest driver issue'.

> Linux guest:
> Fedora 15 guest X process runs at nearly 100% when trying to do anything
> via a SPICE client either Windows or Linux.  Our last understanding is
> that this is a driver problem thus the current implementation seems
> broken.
>
> Windows guest - both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008:
> SPICE is transferring four to five times as much data across the wire as
> RDP even with effects disabled.  VDAgent is running although it is
> sometimes unstable and we are using a virtio serial driver.  QXL driver
> is working.  We were told it that our packet traces seemed to indicate
> we were not compressing images even though we are configured to do so,
> our bandwidth is less than 10 Mbps, and the qemu server logs seem to
> indicate we are using compression.  We reconfigured to force compression
> and saw the same anecdotal results.  I'm not sure how we measure this if
> the configuration and logs are saying we are compressing.  How can we
> verify this lack of compression? Is this discerned from the Wireshark
> dissector? If so, is there a newer one available than the one on the web
> site?

Attached please find the latest source of the Spice dissector. It's not 
that great (and it's a hacky reverse-engineered dissector), but it gets 
the work done.
Feel free to send me (off-list, compressed) packet captures that look 
wrong, and I might try to fix some of the issues (I'm aware of many 
already, the code is full of FIXME's and TODOs).
Y.

> We were losing most mouse scroll events.  This seems to be much better
> after upgrading our Windows clients to spice-protocol-0.8.1 today.  I do
> not know if that is coincidental.  A yum upgrade to the Fedora 15 host
> did not pull in a new spice-protocol; it is still 0.8.0 and I would
> assume we need 0.8.1 on both sides to see any benefit but that is just a
> guess.  Scrolling is delayed like just about all events but at least it
> is no longer lost.
>
> VDAgent stops responding randomly. Although this is MUCH better since
> disabling the powersave options, it still occurs.  We've opened a bug
> report and submitted the vdagent and vdservice logs.
>
> So, I suppose one question is, are these because of misconfigurations on
> our part or are they bugs still being worked out in SPICE? Would it make
> more sense for use to recompile everything from git? If so, which
> repository? However, does that then imply that SPICE is not yet really
> ready for production WAN use?
>
> Sorry to be a pain but I suppose it is because we really want to use
> SPICE but we keep coming up a little short compared to more mature
> technologies.  Thanks - John
>
>
>
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