Spice support in current and future Alma releases

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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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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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!

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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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/

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.

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!

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.