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Comment by tlamponi | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder if tools like Proxmox could use this as a more efficient alternative to VNC (which is slow and weird) or SPICE (for which there are very few non-Linux tools).

Yeah, we at Proxmox are actually evaluating such things, and we hope that IronRDP and QEMU display [0] can be part of a stack that replaces SPICE in the long term, but it will need a bit more time to see how this play out and what exact role it can play in Proxmox VE.

Another experiment is to see if we can add a more modern video encoding to QEMU, as the recently released noVNC 1.6 gained support for H.264 [1]; albeit we naturally would prefer something more open like AV1.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/marcandre.lureau/qemu-display/

[1]: https://github.com/novnc/noVNC/releases/tag/v1.6.0

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We would be very happy if proxmox were to adopt IronRDP. I see you've already found the work from Marc-André Lureau, he's been doing an incredible job for the IronRDP server side. He's also been working on adding QOI image codec in IronRDP with incredible results. You're welcome to pop in the IronRDP matrix channel: https://matrix.to/#/!opeocvkWZVaLDouykU:matrix.org?via=matri...

Thanks not only for your reply and chat invitation but also all of you for the work on this nice project!

I'll relay your invitation to the persons mainly doing the evaluation. And good to hear that QOI image coded is getting further adoption.

Compute overhead of H.264 encoder is non-negligible for a VM host where I want all my CPU cycles to go to user VMs. Datacenter-class Intel CPUs (Xeon) don't include H.264 encoders in hardware. QuickSync circuitry is generally limited to consumer-grade CPUs. Not to mention MPEG licensing issues.

AV1 eliminates MPEG licensing issues, but encoding in hardware is even more limited. Also, AV1 is great for encode-once use cases (e.g. YouTube) since it's heavily geared towards reducing bandwidth requirements vs. encode speed. It's workable for real-time streaming in the lowest settings, but H.264 is still better overall.

Wouldn't it also be a problem that, IIUC, a CPU only has one encoding engine, so you could only have one active stream (at full speed), in a multi-tenant scenario?

Note that this is a bit of a POV thing. For one, CPU cycles handling display also go (indirectly) to your user. And if your users gets a crisper and better picture with less bandwidth due to a modern codec then it can be also seen as win in my book.

Modern CPUs more often have the building blocks included for video encoding, and getting one of those, or a dedicated GPU, probably makes sense if the Users/VMs workload depends on graphical output.

That said, you're definitively also right that it won't be a win for every use case on every hardware, so definitively something to look at more closely, and if it really is worse than the status quo on systems without dedicate GPU and where the CPU has now HW accelleration than the status quo, which I doubt, then adding an opt-out will definitivelys make sense.

> "need a bit more time to see how this play out and what exact role it can play in Proxmox VE."

It's been around for six years?

Seems like enough to say "let's try it out, see how things go, I bet if we start working with it, things will accelerate rapidly" to me.

Here I'm talking about our integration, which means full audit of what's possible in a simple POC, then a more involved look to see how we can integrate it nicely in the Proxmox VE stack, from low level QEMU to the REST API and its ACL system.

We started evaluation a few weeks ago in combination with the QEMU display work, which is still experimental and was initially announced mid-January this year, so we're still at the POC stage and thus this work will be a bit more time. I did nowhere say that IronRDP will need more time.

And FWIW, without an integrated approach RDP gains you almost nothing over plain VNC if you have only the reduced interfaces and access from outside the VM, so using something like IronRDP earlier on its own would not have gained us much besides an extra component to maintain, that's why we did not checked out integration earlier.

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