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SPICE support added to upstream qemu

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 09:04 Haydn Solomon

This week saw the first set of SPICE patches introducted to upstream qemu. These are early patches so it’s still unstable but it works good enough to start playing with it. The patches are also dependent on libspice which have not yet been committed so you’ll have to build your own. It’s also interesting to note that the SPICE project now falls under the freedesktop. org project so a lot of the code needed to build the library will be sourced from there. I haven't started playing with this yet but I'll document procedures for getting this up and running in a follow up post.

To see the announcement on the mailing list see the following link.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-04/msg00967.html
 

See Also

Comments

Cool

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 12:06 blinkiz

This is a super cool beginning. Really nice. Keep up the good work about the coverage on the virtualization market.

SPICE support added to upstream qemu?

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 14:29 Kenni Lund

Hi Haydn, can you give a link to something confirming that the SPICE support has been added to upstream qemu, like your post suggests?

I had a quick look at qemu's git, and I don't see any SPICE support. Furthermore, the link to the "announcement" is just a RFC patch...I'm really looking forward to get some alternative to VNC in qemu, just like you, but looking at this patch, I would not be surprised if this didn't make it into qemu for another 6 months.

Re: SPICE support added to upstream qemu

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 14:37 Haydn Solomon

Kenni,

These patches are RFC patches so maybe I should have mentioned this detail :-). They won't be committed yet but you can find qemu with this patchset at the following link.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/qemu/?h=spice.v3

You should be able to do a git clone using the following command to try this out.

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/spice/qemu

 

Re: switching to SPICE branch

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 14:58 Haydn Solomon

Kenni,

Just tried this myself and you won't see the spice branch by default. It will be hidden. Issue the following commands to see it in git. 

$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/spice.v3

Then switch branch with a command like the following.

$ git checkout -b spice.v3 remotes/origin/spice.v3
Branch spice.v3 set up to track remote branch spice.v3 from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'spice.v3'

Verify that you are on the spice branch

$ git branch
  master
* spice.v3

That should work

 

Re: SPICE support added to upstream qemu

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 15:57 Kenni Lund

Haydn,

I'm not that much into git, so I might have misunderstood something here...as I see it, I find the headline of the blogpost wrong and misleading. To take it to an extreme, wouldn't the following headline be more correct?

"SPICE developers have created some patches for initial SPICE support in QEMU, which doesn't follow the QEMU coding standards and have posted them to the QEMU development mailing list, as well as uploaded them to their own GIT repository. The patches will perhaps at some point, or perhaps never, be included in upstream QEMU".

Have I totally lost it or is this not somewhat correct?

Thanks for a nice blog, I would not have noticed these patches if you haven't put up a post about it :)

Re: SPICE support added to upstream qemu

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 16:15 Haydn Solomon

Kenni,

To be honest, I didn't realize till after I published and you mentioned it that these are only RFC patches and not committed to main upstream branch but a testing branch. I guess a better headline might have been "SPICE development branch available for testing" or something like that. I do apologize if it seems misleading but this was not the intent.  Appreciate your comments and feedback as always.

Re: SPICE support added to upstream qemu

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 16:31 Kenni Lund

Haydn,

No worries :) Btw. has the mail notification on replies been disabled or is it broken again? I haven't received any mails regarding your replies to this blog post, but on the other hand, I don't see any option to enable/disable this while posting replies.

Re: SPICE support added to upstream qemu

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 16:55 Haydn Solomon

Actually I thought it was fixed since I receive email notifications. I did mean to email you about this. I'll test it out this weekend with another username (other than admin)  to make sure it's working.

configure was not able to find it

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 18:53 pavlinux

# git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/spice/qemu qemu-splice
# cd qemu-splice
# git checkout -b spice.v3 remotes/origin/spice.v3
# ./configure --enable-spice
ERROR
ERROR: User requested feature spice
ERROR: configure was not able to find it
ERROR

What's is mean? How to enable spice?

Re: configure was not able to find it

Friday, April 16, 2010 - 19:12 Haydn Solomon

pavlinux,

I haven't tried building it yet. I"ll work on it this weekend and update post.

Just remove "# quick hack for

Sunday, April 18, 2010 - 15:19 pavlinux

Just remove "# quick hack for kraxel's spice devel environment" :)

QEMU Aborted

Sunday, April 18, 2010 - 16:00 pavlinux

# qemu -spice -spice port=1234,disable-ticketing
qemu: qemu-option.c:764: qemu_opts_parse: Assertion `!permit_abbrev || list->implied_opt_name' failed.

Re: qemu aborted

Monday, April 19, 2010 - 02:46 Haydn Solomon

pavlinux,

I got the development version installed and running but getting same errors as you are. Thanks for the tip on removing the quick hack for kraxel section. Still working on it..

Interesting, looking forward

Monday, April 19, 2010 - 12:10 jst (not verified)

Interesting, looking forward to your howto

any progress on qemu spice

Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - 10:54 Anonymous (not verified)

Have there been any updates or progress getting qemu spice built?

I work with ubuntu and I'm interested in trying spice but qemu-spice needs to be available first.

I am so glad to see that

Saturday, May 28, 2011 - 23:45 Anonymous (not verified)

I am so glad to see that spice support has been added to the upstream QEMU. I think some work is still yet to be done since the patches aren’t stable at times but I think this would soon be solved. The only issue apart from the instability of the patches is the fact that these patches depend on libspice which means we do not have any other choice than to build on our own. I hope they rectify the solution by clinging upon something independent!
_________________________________________________________________________
ingersoll rand security technologies

You need to install

Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - 21:49 ZhouPeng.cn (not verified)

You need to install libspiceserver and spice-protocol first.
If it still fails,
append your libspiceserver and spice-protocol pkgconfig path to $PKG_CONFIG_PATH
like this
export $PKG_CONFIG_PATH=:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:xxx:xxx

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