[Qemu-devel] [RfC PATCH 00/11] Add spice support to qemu.

[Gerd Hoffmann]

  Hi folks,

Here is a early spice patch series for review and comments.  It is not
yet complete (save/load/migration isn't addressed at all yet) and it has
some known issues (local rendering isn't fully functional).  Also things
are in flux in upstream spice, this patch series depends on not-yet
committed libspice patches (see below for build instructions).
Nevertheless it works good enougth that you can start playing with it
and I also like to gather review comments and get merge planning
started.


Some background info:

Spice is a remote desktop protocol.  The (slightly outdated) project
website with background information is http://www.spice-space.org/  The
download section has windows guest drivers.  You need the unstable
versions for these patches.


Building spice:

The spice project runs under the freedesktop.org umbrella now, the git
repositories are hosted @ freedesktop.org.  You'll need:

 (1) spice-protocol.  http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/spice-protocol/
     This carries all the spice protocol structs.
 (2) celt051.  
http://www.spice-space.org/yum_repo_data/f12/src/celt051-0.5.1.3-0.fc12.src.rpm
     Version 0.5.1 of the celt audio codec.  This is the only unusual
     (aka distros don't carry it) build dependency left for spice.
 (3) A bunch of devel packages.  Especially log4cpp and cegui.
     Everything else spice needs should be on your disk already if you
     are doing qemu development.
 (4) A pretty recent pixman version (0.18.0+).
 (5) spice itself.  http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~kraxel/spice/log/?h=api.v3
     This brings both libspice-server and the spice client.
 (6) This patch series.  Also available from
     http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/qemu/log/?h=spice.v3

If everything goes well qemu configure should autodetect that spice is
available.


Testing & using spice:

* Enable spice in qemu:
  qemu -spice port=1234,password=$secret        # password protected
  qemu -spice port=1234,disable-ticketing       # allow connects without 
password

* Enable qxl vga device (recommended):
  qemu -spice $options -vga qxl

* Enable multihead (in theory, just noticed its broken, to be debugged ...)
  qemu -spice $options -vga qxl -device qxl

* Enable sound:
  QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=spice qemu -spice $options -device AC97

* Adding a absolute pointing device aka tablet is strongly recommended:
  qemu -usbdevice tablet

* Start spice client:
  spicec -h localhost -p 1234 -w $secret

The spice client has two important hot keys: Shift+F11 (toggle
Fullscreen) and Shift+F12 (release pointer grab).  If you add a usb
tablet you hopefully never ever need Shift+F12 though.

cheers,
  Gerd