Yesterday Red Hat open sourced it’s SPICE virtual desktop protocol. Red Hat inhertied SPICE with the acquisition of qumranet, the then maintainers of KVM, about a year ago in September 2008. SPICE is described as a core component of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops product that is currently in beta. Red Hat has setup a website dedicated to the development around this product that you can find at www.spice-space.org . Most of the SPICE sources are released under GPLv2 with some exceptions which use LGPL or BSD style licenses. There are also plans on providing Windows binaries but nothing has been done on that front yet.

Current Releases

The website provides some early releases of SPICE currently at version 0.4.0. The packages can be downloaded at the spice website at this location. There are also some Fedora 12 packages availabe at a yum repository dedicated to SPICE. To use this repository use the following commands as described at the website.

To set up spice.repo execute the following commands:

sudo wget -P /etc/yum.repos.d/ http://spice-space.org/download/spice.repo
sudo rpm --import http://spice-space.org/download/RPM-GPG-KEY-spice-fedora-12-x86_64

To install packages do

sudo yum install spice-client
sudo yum install qemu-spice

One thing you should note is that SPICE is not supported on 32-bit platform. It looks like just the client side can be built on a 32-bit platform. The FAQ page on the webiste mentions this.

Integration with Virt-Manager

There has already been some discussion about SPICE integration with virt-manager, Red Hat’s Desktop Virtual machine manager used with it’s Fedora distribution. Currently there’s no integration with virt-manager due to the client code currently being a standalone client app. I image that this will be something the community will want access to and there’s nothing to stop the community from working towards this now that it’s been open sourced. From discussions on the mailing list, developers describe the work required for this as basically making a proper library, ideally providing a GTK widget for embedding. In addition to this there’s work required to get SPICE integrated on the back end with upstream qemu codebase. 

Additional Resources

• The original Red Hat press release can be found at http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2009/spice-os.html
• If you want to follow the development you can sign up for the mailing list here. https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spice-space-devel
• The wiki page can be found at: wiki http://www.spice-space.org/page/Main_Page
• SPICE manual for newbies manual can be found at: http://www.spice-space.org/docs/spice_for_newbies.pdf
• SPICE user manual can be downloaded here: http://www.spice-space.org/docs/spice_user_manual.pdf