[Bug 59747] New: Serial port forwarding

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59747

          Priority: medium
            Bug ID: 59747
          Assignee: spice-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
           Summary: Serial port forwarding
          Severity: normal
    Classification: Unclassified
                OS: All
          Reporter: zhshzhou at cn.ibm.com
          Hardware: Other
            Status: NEW
           Version: unspecified
         Component: client
           Product: Spice

It will be very useful if we can do the following with the virtual machine
serial port.

1) client local peripheral serial device <=> VM serial port
This means Spice client to forward data read from /dev/ttySX to the VM serial
port and vice versa. This will enable us to attach a serial peripheral device
to the virtual machine serial port.

2) client local process <=> VM serial port
This means Spice client to forward data read from an IPC mechanism with a local
process to the VM serial port. This will enable us to record the data steam
from VM serial port, run a script against the VM serial port or do other things
like forwarding the data to socat. If the the guest start a agetty on the
remote serial port, we can get access to the guest console from the client.

3) VM1 serial port <=> VM2 serial port
In the above 2), if the client local process is socat, then we can connect two
VMs' serial ports using a pair of back-to-back Spice client like as follow.
VM1 serial port <=> Spice client1 <=> client local process(socat) <=> Spice
client2 <=> VM2 serial port
This enables VMs communicate with each other via serial port just like they are
connected with serial cable.

I had a look at QEMU and Spice server code, and find there is already support
for spicevmc and char device VDI and there is a port channel concept at the
client side. I think adding a channel at the client side to just forward serial
port data stream may not be hard. If the Spice client can export an Unix socket
at the client side and forward the data to the guest console. Then we can use
socat to forward the data to /dev/ttySX which is 1) or to other process which
is 2). Can we do this?

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