[Spice-devel] Current status of XSpice driver

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Sat, 2011-06-25 at 20:38 +0200, Alon Levy wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 06:01:27PM +0200, Sebastian Hesselbarth wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'd like to ask about the current and future status of the XSpice driver for
> > Xorg. I am very interested in virtualizing desktops for a bunch of users without
> It is in active development, no stable release yet. It's meant to allow using spice
> clients to connect to an X server directly, never mind if it is running in a vm or not.
> It reuses the X driver, so it has the same features (and lacks the same features).
> 
> > the need of a full-blown virtual machine. I once compiled the driver from git
> > but without luck of connecting a client to it (errors were about server and
> > client disagree about modes AFAIR). 
> > 
> If you used master branch please pull and try again. I have no such problems, so
> I'd like to know why it isn't working for you. I'm using master spice+spice-protocl
> and just standard X clients. I am compiling against X master, so perhaps that's the
> problem. (or maybe I neglected to pull something and I'm actually using an old version
> of one of the protos).
> 
> > Can someone please clarify the requirements for compiling the current XSpice 
> > driver. I really like to help improve the driver with debugging, coding, and
> > suggestions.
> I mainly test it with everything needed built from git. Also, I've just updated
> master (forced), but generally the most uptodate right now is the xspice.vN (N=5 atm).
> 
> Everything means xserver and other dependencies needed at runtime (xkbcomp etc.).
> I haven't documented everything yet, but see README.xspice:
>  http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~alon/xspice/tree/README.xspice
>  
<snip>
Oh wow - I wasn't even aware this existed.  Just to make sure I'm not
reading something into this which it isn't and to make sure I'm not
confused by the terminology (e.g., X server and client, SPICE server and
client) even after reading everything I could find about it, let me see
if I understand how this works.

We start an X Server on any kind of Linux system - bare metal, lxc
container, etc.  We can run any kind of X client on that Linux system
such as kdm or kdesktop and it will use the SPICE enabled X Server as a
regular X Server.  We then connect a remote SPICE client to the SPICE
server on that system and are able to see that desktop remotely with all
the efficiencies of SPICE as if it was running inside of KVM.  Do I
understand that correctly? Thanks - John