Once interviewed for an automotive embedded software position and they asked me if I was familiar with SPICE. Naturally assumed they meant the circuit simulator, answered yes and they did not dig deeper
Only later in the job I realized that they had meant Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination.
I would never call a software project SPICE; I use a fucking search engine when naming things to avoid the cringe of ignorantly landing on a dupe. (And also use SPICE in the LTSpice incarnation; I should give ngspice a spin one of these days.)
Agreed. The SPICE electronics simulator is over fifty years old, and is still very important to people who have to design electronics. It's inside many other electronics design tools. It's standard enough that when a manufacturer comes out with a new analog IC, they often provide a SPICE model for it. Otherwise nobody wants to design it into their circuit. Reusing the name for another program is like calling something new FORTRAN.
(I had nothing to do with SPICE, other than as a user. It's by Laurence Nagel, and I'm John Nagle. Not related.)
As an irregular user of spice (via Proxmox PVE), I wish the stars would align for QEMU to gain support for sunlight/moonlight streaming directly in the hypervisor. That'd be a killer app for VDI-style infrastructure, now that accelerated guest graphics via Venus, VirtIO GPU, and Intel's support for SR-IOV is finally coming together.
This would be ideal. I've been reading about Moonlight a lot lately, and it's many children. I'm building a new home theater set up and will be trying it soon.
> I wish the stars would align for QEMU to gain support for sunlight/moonlight streaming directly in the hypervisor.
I didn't know I wanted it until you said it.
I have a few QEMU VMs where I use PCI-passthrough of a whole GPU and a USB controller, and wire the display and USB outputs physically into a KVM switch - works great, but not having to fiddle with the KVM (and run out of physical ports) would be - indeed, killer app.
I really don't get why redhat decided to kill SPICE. It was the only thing that got using a VM on open source virtualization (e.g. proxmox) close to the experience of using one on vmware.
VNC is truly the worst remote desktop protocol you can have. Bad latency, bad quality, bad integration.
Not enough people want to pay for VDI basically, certainly compared to how much it costs to maintain it. SPICE at the time that we abandoned it "only" supported 2D and video compression, which is complicated enough, but everyone wanted 3D support which would have added another labyrinthine stack on top.
Also the code at the time was a massive security nightmare, written with no validation of fields in the network protocol. It was unmarshalling stuff off the network and sending it directly to X11 libs without even bounds checking. (I sincerely hope this has improved.)
With that said, I wish the project well. SPICE is a much better user experience than VNC, especially if you're looking for something that supports audio, video and USB passthru.
Now that NoMachine 10 has no free option, I’ve decided that I should try to burn some tokens on making a good, performant remote desktop system. I’m targeting moonlight-like performance with Windows RDP-like user experience. Cross-platform.
I don’t need my particular repo to be the one where this gets solved, but now that coding agents are really good, we shouldn’t have to put up with paying for shit software anymore, IMO.
Did the same thing. Added the exact features I wanted/needed to FreeRDP and had Claude generate a lightweight server from scratch. Bye, bye, TeamViewer, Windows RDP, and VNC.
I did all of my development for a couple years on my first startup in a VM on my proxmox server, connected through spice. Was extremely nice being able to just go from desktop to laptop to any other machine that I had available and have the same environment available everywhere.
It's been a few years and I haven't had a need for it recently, but it's sad to hear that they stopped supporting it.
I guess I hadn't been paying attention. Is this just the Windows SPICE client that Red Hat has abandoned, or are they moving toward dropping SPICE altogether? Does Red Hat no longer have a VDI product? (I'm sure they did at one point.)
Yes, Red Hat dropped SPICE support quite some time ago. Apparently in RHEL 8.3: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5414901 It's definitely not part of any current Red Hat product. See my other reply for why this is.
I don't think we have a VDI product as such, assuming you discount VNC which we do support but is hardly a full VDI solution.
I used to use x2goserver which was and still is awesome.
These days I prefer docker-based KASM Workspaces, or if you just want a nice GUI over your "bare-metal" VM or server then KasmVNC is great and easy to setup (not that KASM Workspaces is hard to setup)
SPICE is not in any danger of dying; it's the thing every analog EE uses to simulate their circuits, and has been for 40 years. This remote desktop thing needs to change its name.
The page doesn't make what SPICE is for obvious, aside from linking to other pages, but they are not talking about the circuit simulation tool. (It appears to be some sort of tool for accessing desktops of virtual machines remotely.)
I have the impression that you could also use it for accessing desktops of real machines remotely, too, but that's only because I keep running into it when I'm looking for information about the real SPICE, a 50-year-old open-source program used to design every computer you've ever used and for which the IEEE awarded Donald Pedersen the Medal of Honor.
I wish somebody would build a C version of xpra which does only has the client side for latency hiding and manages the remote caching using X11 messages only.
Probably not everyone's thing, but nice layout and color choice! I like the way how it slightly overlaps the surrounding text, but doesn't make it unreadable.
You mean the closed source code that Red Hat acquired when we bought Qumranet for $100 million, then open sourced, maintained at a loss for many years, and is now (still) open source and available to everyone to use as they wish?
Whether RH paid $100M for this well poisoning, or however much more/less it pays its staff developers to do the same (i.e. wayland, systemd...), the effect is the same: more churn & instability in the Linux space.
Using it often. Mostly via ngspice nowadays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngspice
Only later in the job I realized that they had meant Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination.
(I had nothing to do with SPICE, other than as a user. It's by Laurence Nagel, and I'm John Nagle. Not related.)
Ngspice is okay but it's a bit clumsy switching between it and xschem.
Edit: typo
You mean ‘virtualization’ here, I guess.
I didn't know I wanted it until you said it.
I have a few QEMU VMs where I use PCI-passthrough of a whole GPU and a USB controller, and wire the display and USB outputs physically into a KVM switch - works great, but not having to fiddle with the KVM (and run out of physical ports) would be - indeed, killer app.
VNC is truly the worst remote desktop protocol you can have. Bad latency, bad quality, bad integration.
Also the code at the time was a massive security nightmare, written with no validation of fields in the network protocol. It was unmarshalling stuff off the network and sending it directly to X11 libs without even bounds checking. (I sincerely hope this has improved.)
With that said, I wish the project well. SPICE is a much better user experience than VNC, especially if you're looking for something that supports audio, video and USB passthru.
https://github.com/x3haloed/ascry
I don’t need my particular repo to be the one where this gets solved, but now that coding agents are really good, we shouldn’t have to put up with paying for shit software anymore, IMO.
It's been a few years and I haven't had a need for it recently, but it's sad to hear that they stopped supporting it.
Regardless, thanks for picking this up, OP.
I don't think we have a VDI product as such, assuming you discount VNC which we do support but is hardly a full VDI solution.
These days I prefer docker-based KASM Workspaces, or if you just want a nice GUI over your "bare-metal" VM or server then KasmVNC is great and easy to setup (not that KASM Workspaces is hard to setup)
https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm https://github.com/kasmtech/KasmVNC
I wish op all the best, it's a tough journey
Edit: great work on this fork, by the way.
x11rdp has been good to me.