[Spice-devel] SPICE for text mode serial consoles ?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 11:18:42AM -0500, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> > A long time back OpenStack had a remote text console service, in parallel
> > with its VNC console console. This was later deleted because it was using
> > insecure code from an unmaintained 3rd party project. Fairly frequently
> > though people raise the issue of re-enabling remote text (ie serial)
> > console access, as a low bandwidth alternative to a fully graphical
> > console.
> > 
> > I was wondering, given that SPICE is designed with many independant
> > data channels, would it make sense to provide a way to add new channel
> > type that could transport a text mode console ? eg SPICE would act as
> > the backend for QEMU serial ports, as well as the graphical display.
> > Clients could have a choice of opening the graphics related channels,
> > the serial port channels, or both.
> 
> It's kind of possible today
> 
> -chardev spiceport,name=org.spice.spicy,id=charchannel1 -serial chardev:charchannel1
> 
> booting kernel with console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200n8 and connecting with spicy will give you kernel log in client console..
> 
> There is even a standard port name for it: org.qemu.console.serial.0

Cool, I love it when my ideas have already been mostly implemented :-)

> But integration with client is left to do, also I don't know what's
> the right way to setup the VM to make this work nicely with login etc..

If you boot with  "console=ttyS0" then systemd would automatically start
a login prompt on the serial port. I think you can probably even make it
do both graphical & text logins using 'console=ttyS0 console=tty'

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|