Red Hat SPICE protocol advances but release could be a year away

In September 2008, Red Hat acquired Israel-based company Qumranet for $107 million and with it the company’s virtualization solutions, including its Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) technology and the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) remote protocol.

KVM is now growing in popularity for desktop virtualization and cloud solution offerings, and the SPICE protocol could prove to be one of the key elements to wider adoption of the technology.

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SPICE is a remote computing solution that provides client access to remote machine displays and devices, such as keyboard, mouse, and audio. SPICE achieves a user experience that is similar to an interaction with a local machine, while trying to offload most of the intensive CPU and GPU tasks to the client.

Back in December 2009, Red Hat made a decision to open-source its SPICE protocol in hopes of rallying support from the open source community and making the protocol even better and more far reaching. The company also hoped that doing so would break down barriers to virtualization adoption by overcoming traditional desktop virtualization challenges, emphasizing user experience, and ultimately contributing to interoperability — and even make the protocol a new standard. The company faces increased competition in this area from three big virtualization heavy hitters: Citrix (HDX), Microsoft (RDP), and VMware (PCoIP).

To help ensure that the SPICE project would be successful, the open source group set forth the following project goals:

• To deliver a high-quality user experience, similar to a local machine, in LAN environments
• To maintain low CPU consumption in order to have high VM density on the host
• To provide high-quality video streaming and 3D

Perhaps feeling the heat from its more established competitors, the SPICE project team seems to be making some good progress on those goals. This month saw the release of version 0.5.2 of the SPICE protocol, and while this version is part of the unstable branch, it does mark the release of the project’s first stable API. It also introduces support for off-screen surfaces and reaches 80 percent completion for QEMU integration.

The group is working toward getting the upstream QEMU to support SPICE and QXL without requiring patches. They are also looking to add better support for limited network resource environments across the WAN in order to achieve a user experience that is more similar to an actual LAN experience. To achieve this, the group needs to improve SPICE bandwidth utilization with a reasonable cost of more CPU utilization. The core of this feature is reaching a better compression ratio for bitmaps that are sent from the server to the client.

The project’s website lists other important planned features, such as:

• Network tunneling (in progress) — Using a virtual network interface to enable sharing of network resources. The current focus is on printer sharing but it is not limited to that alone.
• Off-screen surfaces (in progress) — Supports off-screen surfaces as infrastructure for future DirectDraw, video acceleration, and 3D acceleration. GDI and X11 will also benefit from this feature, and it will lay the foundation for multihead support, which is becoming more popular.
• Clipboard sharing (in progress) — Allows clients to share their clipboards with SPICE servers to support copy and paste between client and guest
• USB sharing (in progress) — Allows clients to share their USB devices with SPICE servers. This may include things such as booting from and/or accessing USB mass storage devices, Web cameras, printers, smartphones, and smart cards.
• Direct Draw
• Client GUI — Enables user-friendly configuration.
• Screen management — Adds support for enabling selection of the screen used by the client.
• Configuration file — Enables persistent user and administrative settings.
• CD sharing — Enables you to share your CD with SPICE server.
• Video acceleration
• 3D acceleration
• Aero support
• Linux features parity
• Mac OS X client support
• Simultaneous client connections

One other planned feature of particular interest centers around the client and its future support for non-x86 platforms. With VDI popularity growing and more end-users turning their management desires to smart devices such as Apple’s iPad and iPhone and Android-based tablet devices, it is no wonder that this group is looking to expand beyond the x86 platform for client support.

In the future, the SPICE project plans to provide additional solutions that include remote access for physical machines and a VM front end for local users (render on and share devices of the same physical machine).

According to the group, the next stable release, version 0.6.0, is planned for Aug. 16. After that the group plans a follow-up stable release, version 0.8.0, for Feb. 15, 2011. At that rate, it sounds like a 1.0 release shouldn’t be expected until sometime during the second half of 2011.

You can find out more information or participate in the SPICE open source project by visiting the SPICE project’s website.

This story, “Red Hat SPICE protocol advances but release could be a year away,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.