[Spice-devel] SPICE for text mode serial consoles ?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 11:01:16AM -0500, i iordanov wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> Would the spiceterm project from Proxmox be of interest?
> 
> https://git.proxmox.com/?p=spiceterm.git;a=blob_plain;f=spiceterm.pod;hb=master

That is running a shell server side and then rendering it
into a graphical display which is then transported over
SPICE as a bitmap. That is a rather inefficient way of
sending a plain text data stream, and the client can't
turn this bitmap back into plain text for display on a
local text terminal. For this to be of value we want
to be transporting plain text end-to-end in both directions.

> On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 10:37 AM, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange at redhat.com>wrote:
> 
> > A long time back OpenStack had a remote text console service, in parallel
> > with its VNC console console. This was later deleted because it was using
> > insecure code from an unmaintained 3rd party project. Fairly frequently
> > though people raise the issue of re-enabling remote text (ie serial)
> > console access, as a low bandwidth alternative to a fully graphical
> > console.
> >
> > I was wondering, given that SPICE is designed with many independant
> > data channels, would it make sense to provide a way to add new channel
> > type that could transport a text mode console ? eg SPICE would act as
> > the backend for QEMU serial ports, as well as the graphical display.
> > Clients could have a choice of opening the graphics related channels,
> > the serial port channels, or both.
> >
> > NB I'm not saying I've time to work on this at all - I was just wondering
> > if this was conceptually a reasonable feature to propose.


Daniel
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