Re: Qemu vnc color depth

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 03:18:59PM +0000, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >>1) quietly starting to do the conversion on vnc server (not gaining any 
> >>performances here);
> >
> >This should be the default behaviour
> > 
> >>2) closing the vnc connection with the client, so the client can 
> >>reconnect and choose the new pixel format.
> >
> >This is evil. If we need a way to notify the client of colour depth
> >changes, then we should define an official VNC extension for this 
> >that clients can implement. cf the desktop-resize extension
> >
> >So, if the client supports the extension use that to notify, otherwise
> >fallback to doing server-side conversions. 
> 
> This is a good idea, I just hope it won't take ages to be accepted.
> I'll work on this.

There's not really any formal process for VNC extensions. You pretty
much just post to the vnc mailing list & propose what you want to do
and unless its absolutely insane you should get given a psuedo encoding
number reasonably quickly.

Getting it implement in clients is more fun - but feel free to propose
patches to the gtk-vnc mailing list - we aim to be broad compatability
with as many servers as possible & are particularly interested in stuff
that is useful to virtualization.  Also send ideas for the protocol
extension there & we can give feedback on how well it'll work from
the client POV.

> >>By default I am doing 1), however the second choice can be enabled 
> >>passing the -vnc-switch-bpp command line option.
> >
> >Don't add more command line options - the existing -vnc flag already
> >has the ability to take multiple flags in the format:
> >
> >    -vnc hostname:display,flag,flag,flag,flag
> >
> >eg
> >
> >    -vnc localhost:1,passwd,tls
> 
> another good suggestion, I'll modify the patch to use this.

Great, thanks.

> >Please send this to qemu-devel - we should not be introducing yet more
> >xen-specific forks to the QEMU code we have - it is a maintainance
> >disaster already with the number of patches we have.
> >
> 
> Yeah I know, but sending patches to qemu-devel is like &>/dev/null

Yes it can be - you may not get it mereged quickly, but there are quite a
few people who are knowledgable about the VNC server (who don't read 
xen-devel) & might give useful feedback.

Regards,
Dan.
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