From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1NJTVP-0008Nj-ED for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:03:35 -0500 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1NJTVL-0008Lg-Tz for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:03:35 -0500 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=60102 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1NJTVL-0008Lb-Px for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:03:31 -0500 Received: from mail-yw0-f171.google.com ([209.85.211.171]:35586) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1NJTVL-0002MJ-B8 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:03:31 -0500 Received: by ywh1 with SMTP id 1so1717487ywh.18 for ; Sat, 12 Dec 2009 07:03:29 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <4B23B0BE.7080408@codemonkey.ws> Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2009 09:03:26 -0600 From: Anthony Liguori MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: Spice project is now open References: <20091211212135.645864f9@redhat.com> <4B229DCE.7070500@codemonkey.ws> <20091211213911.0dce90dc@redhat.com> <4B22A2D9.6020602@codemonkey.ws> <20091211223250.129675fc@redhat.com> <4B22B035.3010601@codemonkey.ws> <20091211233158.22e6681f@redhat.com> <4B22C093.2090806@codemonkey.ws> <4B231182.1080208@codemonkey.ws> <20091212144433.GA26966@random.random> In-Reply-To: <20091212144433.GA26966@random.random> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Andrea Arcangeli Cc: Paolo Bonzini , qemu-devel@nongnu.org Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > About the discussion of improving VNC, this code has to change and > move so fast (you can see already requests from Alexander to split the > features to allow remote usb from remote qlx, it's expectable code to > change for the better to support more obscure features than 99% of > userbase cares about as it goes open), it's huge, it's unreasonable to > pretend to make official modifications to VNC protocol every time we > do a small change to the protocol to please Alexander or anybody other > reasonable wishes of the day, even vnc could eventually reach > equivalent speedup (which is debatable too). Going the vnc route and > official feature requests to extend the protocol is a dead hand IMHO, > all you can argue is spice or something else separate from vnc. > What I really want is a high quality paper comparing Spice to other options (like VNC) with performance graphs demonstrating why it's so much better. A paper isn't really necessary but what I'd like to see is that level of detailed comparison. Spice has been closed source for a long time. For those that have been involved with Spice development, I'm sure you understand very well why it's so wonderful, but for the rest of us, Spice didn't exist until yesterday so it's going to take a little bit for us to all understand what actually about it makes it special. And with respect to the spice protocol, what's the model around making changes to the specification? Is it just submit a patch to the spice project? You complain about VNC's extensibility, but so far, we have no idea whether it's even possible to extend Spice. Given the interactions so far, I'm a little concerned about how well we can influence the protocol. If spice really needs to be able to evolve on it's own, what would it take for spice to be implementable from an external process? What level of interaction does it need with qemu? As long as we can prevent any device state from escaping from qemu, I'd be very interested in a model where spice lived entirely in a separate address space. Regards, Anthony Liguori