[Spice-devel] Current status of XSpice driver

[Alon Levy]

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 04:02:51PM -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> 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
> 
Yes. It still has some bugs, no secure connection yet, you can only change the
port of spice from the xorg.conf file, none of the compression options are configurable.