[CentOS-virt] SPICE Benchmark

Thu Nov 18 03:02:49 UTC 2010
Scott Dowdle <dowdle at montanalinux.org>

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.

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. :)

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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