Spice support in current and future Alma releases

General Discussion & Chat
1

Hi everyone,

Given the fact that AlmaLinux has abandoned the 1:1 RHEL target and started providing some of its own packages in its own repos, is there any chance that it’ll reintroduce support for the SPICE protocol on the server/QEMU side?

I am not sure what the effort may be, but I assume some are missing it, it makes VDI pretty smooth for non-intensive usage and support audio and USB passthrough, which, to my knowledge, VNC does not support.

Has this ever been discussed? Is there any plan or desiderata?

TIA!

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2

Hi there! I see that we didn’t get a reply to you here, but it’s on the agenda for the next ALESCo meeting to discuss this.

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3

Hi Benny!

Thanks for the prompt reply and sorry for my late one (tried to get some days off to enjoy the summer! :slight_smile: ).

Great news, I hope the committee finds it worthy of inclusion, can’t wait! I will be crossing my fingers for the time being.

Thanks again, have a great one!

4

In our ALESCo meeting yesterday, we agreed that this feature will be enabled with AlmaLinux 10. Based on how that goes, we can revisit enabling it for AlmaLinux 9.

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5

Hi, to feat my needs in medical school, I have pulled out a COPR repository with an EL9 qemu-kvm stack, reverting all the EL8 behavior with spice enabled, that a growing number of people I mostly don’t know also rely on.

It’s a personal effort and I don’t provide any official support, but since then, the few post-test bugs that were early reported have been fixed in a relatively short period of time.

I’ve just finished a similar stack for Centos Stream 10 now.

https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ligenix/enterprise-qemu-spice/

6

Hi, the announcement of AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 with SPICE support is really great news. I had a look at your spec files and you miss some parts to be fully compliant with former RHEL behavior. QXL support is not re-enabled in qemu-kvm and you have to enable spice in virt-manager also.

7

Hi, what do you mean with your last sentence? You have to enable spice in virt-manager? I haven’t looked at Kitten yet, you mean you can’t find it?

And yeah, great job with Kitten, people!

8

Hi, I looked at what was changed in the various spec files to see what is different from my own refactoring of SPICE to anticipate whether I can rely on Kitten in the future or if I should stick with my previous work.

For my use, virt-manager is the tool of choice for managing other SPICE SSH connections. In the virt-manager spec file, SPICE support was removed for %{?rhel} and maintained only for %{?fedora}, so it needs to be reintroduced for %{?almalinux}.

QXL support is also required if you want to use SPICE with Windows.