Questions about experimental Spice compositor rebase

Wed Mar 9 19:32:05 UTC 2016

Hi, Fabio! Sorry for long silence.

Kind regards
Yury Shvedov

On 03/07/2016 12:12 AM, Fabio Fantoni wrote:
> Il 06/03/2016 13:25, Yury Shvedov ha scritto:
>> Hi, Fabio!
>> I made 3 new commits. First one updates code to work with new Spice 
>> API. Here, as I think, must be Spice version check if for example in 
>> Debian 8 it less than 0.11.
>
> Debian 8 have spice-server 0.12.5, debian 7 with backports have 
> 0.12.4, in any case is good added a check in configure for minimum 
> required version, I did a commit with >=0.11.2 check based on your api 
> update, from a fast look I didn't saw newer api. Other optional cases 
> (like lz4) is/will be with define.
> Spice compositor differently from rdp one now should support some 
> stable versions. This I think is good to avoid rdp compositor problem 
> that make it after some years still unable in some major distros: 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=775855 (was blocked 
> by 814676 - update freerdp)
> There are other cases that make the maintainer of solid distributions 
> refractory to support it.
OK then! =)
>
>>
>> Second one is regarding your remarks. I hurried too much with editing 
>> your commits. I'm sorry. So I left your logic but in another stile. I 
>> used "int compression" to handle invalid data. But than found 
>> SPICE_IMAGE_COMPRESS_INVALID value and changed the variable type back 
>> to spice_image_compression_t. I think this part is OK now, but if you 
>> have something to say or change there, fill free to do it =)
>
> Thanks, seems very good, in wan compression options case is also 
> better having specific error message on each option.
> I did some commits:
> https://github.com/Fantu/compositor-spice/commits/test3
> Can you cherry-pick since after "Add Spice compositor" if are ok for you.
Done! Almost without changes. =)
> About the wan compression patch I did it very fast and I only checked 
> build (success) but I not tested it and is possible that have error or 
> unexpected cases doing it fast, I'll try to do other tests now if I 
> haveenough time but I'm not sure.
I'll try too when I'll find much time.
>
>>
>> Third - I remove some rubbish like dprint from my old code. But I'm 
>> afraid, there still much to do in this sphere. Will be perfect if you 
>> make the revue, but not now - we have more important things to do.
>>
>> For example, next I'm going to read the code of compositor-rdp much 
>> closely to understand how it works. This needed to know did we miss 
>> something.
>>
>> The second thing after that - is to render the screen on the client 
>> side. Now whole images composed on the server and sent fully to the 
>> client.
>
> If will be possible do rendering and image "difference" with opengl 
> (or probably better also with vulkan) I think can be very useful.
This was the main idea of my diploma. More over, my old university 
fellow managed to make the drm device work with non-framebuffer memory. 
We planned to merge our work at the end, but the fate decreed otherwise. 
The problem, I'm thinking to solve here, is that the frameworks (GTK+ or 
Qt) uses their own drawers like Cairo to update the windows and sends to 
desktop manager the whole new window.
> Spice developers added recently spice-egl for support rendering of vm 
> using virgl with 3d but now is only local.
I don't know what they do, but I thought about the next:

 1. calculate the more accurate region of damage
 2. recognize the type of damage:
      * full image replacement (buttons, radios, etc): we can cache the
        control elements on client side to reuse them instead of resending
      * text: spice can send the text maybe we can use this somehow.
      * scrolling: in this case instead of sending whole damage, we can
        send just the little strip of the region edge.
      * complex changes (movie, game, add): nothing to do here, compress
        and send as is.
      * the combination: the add in browser while scrolling.
 3. handle each type of damage by its own way.

This will decrease the amount of data to render remotely (except the 3rd 
case). I'm afraid that this is kind of utopia too, but in theory it is 
possible with using the shaders.
> For remote I don't know if there is something in progress.
> I thinked about better possibility to solve improve latency/efficiency 
> doing all directly with opengl or vulkan (with vk should be possible 
> better manage resources) do directly texture compressed (to avoid some 
> software steps in that I fear most are the leading cause of latency 
> and inefficiency), I saw bc7 that seems to have high quality, alpha 
> support and is mandatory in vulkan but probably still requires too 
> much bandwidth.
> Alternative with streaming with lossy codec like gstreamer project in 
> development (I already tested in vm) seems too many greedy of 
> resources and with too many latency.
> So I do not know if my idea can be implemented in practice or is just 
> utopia.
> I have too little knowledge to better evaluate.
This is another way of using GPGPU  in our case. May be we need to look 
here first.
>
> I suppose start look rdp and trying to improve generic solution 
> compatible also without hardware acceleration (to keep it usable for 
> all users/cases) is a good/fast thing to do initially as what seems 
> you want already do, after we'll think about utopian things.
Just exactly what I was going to say! =)
> Another thing to look interesting is screen sharing plugin now usable 
> only with rdp, if will be possible add spice support easy/fast 
> probably will be good but I not looked its code for now. (I suppose 
> can be very useful for user remote assistance thing like teamviewer, I 
> suppose that this with spice full features will be better that 
> teamviewer and similar)
Yes, I noted this too.
>
>>
>> By the way! Thank you again for your help! =)
>>
>> P.S. What did you learn about vdagent?
>
> Is very useful (required for mouse client mode, clipboard copy, file 
> transfert, ecc...)
> I saw the difference for example in xen when now pv domUs can't 
> support it and is remarkable.
> It is already implemented in xspice but with a fast look seems have 
> xorg specific things.
> I didn't investigated in detail for now.
OK will remember this and return to
>
> Sorry for my bad english.
But now I suggest you and me to return from sky back to earth. We have 
many things to do. HW acceleration, vdagend, screen sharing, compression 
and authentication is good points. But without any acceptable 
performance they are useless.
Firstly we need to be not worse than rdp-compositor and we know how to 
achieve this. In my opinion it is better for us to stop surfing such 
interesting things like vdagent and vulkan and concentrate on more 
important things.

Honestly, I spent an our, writing this reply (5 minutes I spent on your 
commits). I think you spent much time too looking for technology. In 
fact this was important and realy useful. But now I suggest us to spend 
this time for nearest problems. What do you think? =)
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