[Spice-devel] Looking for help to start learning Spice through bugfix/design

[Fedor Lyakhov]

Thanks for the answer, Marc-André!

I'll think about these areas of enhancements you've suggested. They need a
bit of clarification though - because it isn't clear for a newcomer what
and how to improve :)

As for OS preferences, I'm a cross-platform guy, though giving a favor to
Linux naturally. This may be considered as a minus as I'm used to
cross-platform frameworks which do so much low-level work and hide
OS-specifics behind nice interfaces... I want to mention that I'm used to
C++, so getting in mostly C-written components would be harder for me. What
Spice parts are more C++-friendly actually?

BTW, right now I've come across 2 tickets in the tracker:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63807(No way to filter devices)and
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62033 (Means to detect
local-only, and related https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62187,
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62188). Are they relevant to
work on? I need an advice on how to actually fix them (I've added some
initial suggestions/questions in comments).

For my future work I'm thinking about particular features useful for
enhancing VoIP clients performance/quality within VDI. One of them is
listed at the wiki, http://spice-space.org/page/Features/CodecPassthrough.
While it is useful(and probably should be done at first, or alongside), I
think there are even better possibilities - when the traffic doesn't go to
VM at all. How to implement this - it is another question:) One of the most
obvious ways is to implement something like 'remote media engine'
capability for spice client, and provide an API to apps running at guest
via extending vdagent. It should be easier for audio-only solution, for
video-capable another level of integration would be needed, when this media
engine would be rendering video in the app-provided window from the
guest... Some sort of such 'window overlay' APIs are part of Citrix HDX and
VMWare Horizon View suites actually.

Suggested simple scheme above requires re-write of media subsystems of
VoIP/media consumer applications at the guests - not very feasible... Next
step would be introducing something to support the same for unchanged or
only very slightly changed applications. I have some ideas on this topic as
well, though looking hard/unrealistic/unclear (specific virtual network for
targeted applications, where network traffic is heuristically analyzed and
audio/video isn't transferred but used to control clients' media; signaling
traffic pass-through).

All this seems to be very exciting topic to me, with many different
approaches and directions actually possible. I'd like to hear your opinions
about it, discuss it.

-- 
Best regards,
Fedor

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Marc-André Lureau <mlureau at redhat.com>wrote:

> Hi!
>
> ----- Mensaje original -----
> > Hello Spice developers,
> >
> > First of all, let me thank you for your great software! I'm using it
> daily
> > since recently and I'm very excited about it. Certainly the best in class
> > for Linux guests (at minimum)!
> >
> > I want to contribute to the Spice project and currently I'm seeking for a
> > starting point aside of reading manuals. I'm not quite tough a developer
> to
> > get in and confirm my seriousness with a set of patches or a new
> feature, so
> > I hope for your guidance.
>
> Welcome!
>
> [...]
> > As of now I'm looking for some fairly easy work for a Spice newcomer -
> to get
> > started and learn some basics of Spice.
>
> Spice is composed of many components, and support several guest OS and
> several client OS. Do you have a particular feature or OS in mind? There is
> a lot improvements possible on server code itself to make it more readable
> and maintainable. The integration with qemu could be improved, perhaps
> using a separate main loop, or a different process to increase stability
> and security. It could be worthwhile adding on-disk cache to the client.
> This is not so easy but probably a good way to learn more about Spice :)
> Another interesting way to learn about Spice is to improve the HTML5
> client, or the experimental Weston backend.
>
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