[Spice-devel] How to use spice-streaming-agent properly?

[Snir Sheriber]

On 1/25/20 2:58 PM, ole-krutov at yandex.ru wrote:
> Hello dear devs,
>
> our host has libspice-server1 0.14.2, qemu-kvm 4.1, libvirt 5.0.0 with "ramfb" option for mediated devices enabled,  NVIDIA GRID GPU. We'd like to stream GPU-accelerated video from Linux guests. spice-streaming-agent+gst-plugin is built and sends video encoded to H.264 by NVENC codec from guest. Quality of video is very good, bitrate and presets can be set by cmdline parameters.
> Guest's video config consists of hostdev mediated device which corresponds to NVIDIA vGPU and second "none", which is needed because of libvirt 5.0 does not allow guests with only mediated device set.
> There are two showstoppers:

Hi,

Nice to hear that you are using it with nvenc and having fairly good 
results. Unfortunately
Libvirt does not have the relevant bits to support spice-streaming-agent 
yet.

But I know you should be able to workaround it by setting also qxl (i 
did not try with ramfb):

<qemu:commandline>
    <qemu:arg value='-device'/>
    <qemu:arg value='qxl,max_outputs=1'/>
</qemu:commandline>

max_outputs=1 is required to avoid some bug which is fixed on upstream 
spice server.

> 1) when enabled, the video stream creates a new window in remote-viewer (versions 6.0-8.0) instead of replace old one. Old SPICE traffic is sent along with H264 stream, consuming network and client CPU significantly. When this "old main" trafficis is disabled in remote-viewer, video streaming stops too. Remmina (all new builds including 2020.01.08) does not show this window at all.

I assume this is due to the ramfb. This was not tested yet with the 
spice-streaming-agent setup.

With the above suggested setup (& ramfb disabled) it will also be in 
another window but the first
window should not really be active, you can close it manually.

> 2) No mouse or keyboard control is available in window with video stream, so it can be used just like some "TV set" but all actions should be done in old window. Guest logs say about some mouse activity on unknown display when mouse buttons are pressed on tthis window.

Should also work with this setup.

Snir.

>
> Can that be fixed? Can spice-streaming-agent replace main display channel?
>
> Thanks in advance!
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