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Spice

Summary

Spice aims to provide a complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktops

Owner

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 14
  • Last updated: 2010-07-07
  • Percentage of completion: 0%

Spice 0.6 is scheduled to be released in August.

Detailed Description

The Spice project deals with both the virtualized devices and the front-end.

Currently, the project main focus is to provide high-quality remote access to QEMU virtual machines. The SPICE remote computing protocol that is used for client-server communication. Spice adds a QXL display device to QEMU and provides drivers for this device for both X and Windows. (TODO: add more detailed feature list here: usb, audio, etc)

Red Hat acquired Spice together with kvm when it aqcuired Qumranet, and has invested significant effort into opening it up, cleaning up dependencies, etc.

Benefit to Fedora

In the long term, Spice will let Fedora provide a better user experience in desktop virtualization. In the short term, Fedora gains an interesting new open-source technology that many people want to try out.

Scope

  • Spice support needs to be added to the Fedora qemu package
  • The QXL driver and other Spice components need to be packaged (TODO: list these)


How To Test

TODO: describe how to install spice, and how run a QEMU vm using Spice as the front-end

User Experience

TODO: describe how the UX will change - e.g. in virt-manager

Dependencies

  • qemu

Contingency Plan

Drop the qemu patch, stay with current qemu frontends

Documentation

Release Notes

  • Fedora 14 introduces the Spice framework for desktop virtualization. (TODO: say more here)

Comments and Discussion