[CentOS-virt] SPICE Benchmark

Thu Nov 18 21:54:51 UTC 2010
Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik at iki.fi>

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 10:02:49PM -0500, Scott Dowdle wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> > So as I understand it correctly, this whole SPICE thing is just
> > something like VNC on steroids? Why can't we have this SPICE thing
> > work on physical hosts as well?
> 
> SPICE was specifically designed to be a display protocol for a KVM virtual machine.  Most remote display protocols have two pieces... a client and a server.  SPICE has three... a client, a server, and a qxl device driver provided inside of a KVM virtual machine.  It is probably possible to take the SPICE protocol and adapt it to work without the qxl device driver... but no one has done that yet.
> 
> The best experience I've seen for a remote Linux box was provided by No Machine's NX protocol.  FreeNX comes from NX but it appears FreeNX has stalled.  Google created some project, I forget the name, forked from FreeNX I believe.  No Machine is working on version 4.0 of NX and supposedly will be releasing a beta in the not too distant future.  Some time ago they posted a lot of information about NX 4.0 on their website and it seems to rival SPICE to a certain degree... but that remains to be seen.
> 

Google's NX implementation is called 'neatx': http://code.google.com/p/neatx/

> What I'd like to see happen would be for SPICE to be adapted to a general purpose remote display protocol or perhap Red Hat could buy No Machine and open source that protocol too. :)
> 

NX the protocol is open already.. :) 

Nomachine's NX server product is not..

-- Pasi