[Spice-devel] Current status of XSpice driver

[Alon Levy]

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 10:12:19PM +0200, Attila Sukosd wrote:
> Yes, you do.
> 
> The concept is similar to the Xvnc server in the way it works, where
> you can spawn any X11 apps by setting the DISPLAY var to the correct X
> server.
> 
> I'm not sure about extension support though? (Xrandr etc) I guess
> since its using Xorg and it is "just" another display driver, all the
> other standard Xorg stuff should also be there?

Well, this is where my X knowledge fails me. You are absolutely correct
that it is just another driver (actually three - the spiceqxl one is just qxl
with it's own spice server, and a mouse and keyboard drivers to complete that),
but I don't know about extensions much - it does seem to work with xrandr easily
enough.

> 
> Attila
> 
> On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 10:02 PM, John A. Sullivan III
> <jsullivan at opensourcedevel.com> 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
> >
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> >