[Spice-devel] Possible Windows vdagent problems

[John A. Sullivan III]

Hello, all.  I'm spinning this off of the "Unfair Comparisons with RDP"
thread as that one is getting a bit long.  However, in it, Yaniv
identified that we were not using vdagent in our Windows guest based
upon the packet traces we submitted.  That sounded plausible as we have
noticed the agent being quite unstable.  We are often unable to connect
or the session seems to die.  We then connect as administrator via RDP
and restart the RHEV Spice Agent and all is well again.

I was going to recompile it and reinstall however, after fighting all
day long to compile the Windows client as I thought that would be an
easier test of my Windows compilation prowess as I did not see explicit
instructions for compiling vdagent, I realized that
http://www.spice-space.org/download/binaries/vdagent-win32_20110428.zip
did not contain source but only pre-compiled binaries!

So then I thought our qemu configuration must be off or the needed
options were not support in our version (0.8.8).  However, that does not
appear to be the case:

   <controller type='virtio-serial' index='0'>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x09' function='0x0'/>
    </controller>
[ports='16' seems to be missing - I tried adding it but it was ignored and subsequently removed]
    <channel type='spicevmc'>
      <target type='virtio' name='com.redhat.spice.0'/>
      <address type='virtio-serial' controller='0' bus='0' port='1'/>
    </channel>

When I dump the XML to native, I get:
-device virtio-serial-pci,id=virtio-serial0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x9
-chardev spicevmc,id=charchannel0,name=vdagent
-device virtserialport,bus=virtio-serial0.0,nr=1,chardev=charchannel0,id=channel0,name=com.redhat.spice.0

So what is wrong that we appear to not be using vdagent and why do we
need to keep restarting it? Thanks - John