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

[Marc-André Lureau]

----- Original Message -----
> 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.

It's kind of possible today

-chardev spiceport,name=org.spice.spicy,id=charchannel1 -serial chardev:charchannel1

booting kernel with console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200n8 and connecting with spicy will give you kernel log in client console..

There is even a standard port name for it: org.qemu.console.serial.0

But integration with client is left to do, also I don't know what's the right way to setup the VM to make this work nicely with login etc..