I refuse to let SPICE die | Hacker News Reader

I refuse to let SPICE die

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88 pointsNefarius72 comments

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Major confusion for me, as SPICE is well known circuit simulator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE

Using it often. Mostly via ngspice nowadays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngspice

People who work with virtualization on Linux will (hopefully) all know what SPICE is.

Edit: typo

> with visualization on Linux

You mean ‘virtualization’ here, I guess.

Nope. I work with virtualization on Linux every day, and have done so for many years (and many varieties of virtualization). I didn't recognize it by the name, and I don't remember hearing about it before.

People who know what both of them are (hello) still won't know which one the headline is talking about.

The circuit one is definitely older, probably has more users, and is just as relevant in this forum.

Yes, a circuit simulator.

I would never call a software project SPICE; I use a fucking search engine when naming things to avoid the cringe of ignorantly landing on a dupe. (And also use SPICE in the LTSpice incarnation; I should give ngspice a spin one of these days.)

You're absolutely fucking right.

Ngspice is okay but it's a bit clumsy switching between it and xschem.

Agreed. The SPICE electronics simulator is over fifty years old, and is still very important to people who have to design electronics. It's inside many other electronics design tools. It's standard enough that when a manufacturer comes out with a new analog IC, they often provide a SPICE model for it. Otherwise nobody wants to design it into their circuit. Reusing the name for another program is like calling something new FORTRAN.

(I had nothing to do with SPICE, other than as a user. It's by Laurence Nagel, and I'm John Nagle. Not related.)

We could speedrun this and just call every product "the thing".

That name's already used by an even older technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%...

Indeed, it was what we used in digital circuits lab exercises back in the 90's.

Once interviewed for an automotive embedded software position and they asked me if I was familiar with SPICE. Naturally assumed they meant the circuit simulator, answered yes and they did not dig deeper

Only later in the job I realized that they had meant Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination.

dEtermination. Also quite confusing.

They’re only concerned with capability determination, not name determination. Some people just have no SPINE when it comes to naming things.

It is called ASPICE.

"The abbreviation SPICE stands for Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination. Automotive SPICE (also commonly abbreviated as ASPICE) combines a process reference model and a process assessment model in one standard"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_SPICE

In automotive it's known as SPICE, because the automotive is obvious.

I am happy I am not alone in this

As an irregular user of spice (via Proxmox PVE), I wish the stars would align for QEMU to gain support for sunlight/moonlight streaming directly in the hypervisor. That'd be a killer app for VDI-style infrastructure, now that accelerated guest graphics via Venus, VirtIO GPU, and Intel's support for SR-IOV is finally coming together.

> I wish the stars would align for QEMU to gain support for sunlight/moonlight streaming directly in the hypervisor.

I didn't know I wanted it until you said it.

I have a few QEMU VMs where I use PCI-passthrough of a whole GPU and a USB controller, and wire the display and USB outputs physically into a KVM switch - works great, but not having to fiddle with the KVM (and run out of physical ports) would be - indeed, killer app.

This would be ideal. I've been reading about Moonlight a lot lately, and it's many children. I'm building a new home theater set up and will be trying it soon.

This is a great idea and perhaps not all that hard. I'm getting started on it.

It's possible and I have a very early E2E test. A modification of the sunshine backend itself to be able to connect to qemu. In the future it's definitely possible to have this directly in qemu but it would require reimplementing the whole sunshine protocol

Follow along https://anvil.fangorn.io/fangorn/sunshine-qemu and https://blog.fangorn.io (there isn't anything here yet)

You need a HW encoder per VM, which means vGPU/SR-IOV for anything multi-tenant. But it would work similar to qemu-rdp (which is a better codebase and really, the successor to SPICE): -display dbus can get the framebuffer to any external process, so a Moonlight-protocol server could attach there. Nobody's done it that I can find.

Yes I'm using dbus to get the framebuffer and have very early success

I really don't get why redhat decided to kill SPICE. It was the only thing that got using a VM on open source virtualization (e.g. proxmox) close to the experience of using one on vmware.

VNC is truly the worst remote desktop protocol you can have. Bad latency, bad quality, bad integration.

100% agree. VNC is well past its prime.

I did all of my development for a couple years on my first startup in a VM on my proxmox server, connected through spice. Was extremely nice being able to just go from desktop to laptop to any other machine that I had available and have the same environment available everywhere.

It's been a few years and I haven't had a need for it recently, but it's sad to hear that they stopped supporting it.

Now that NoMachine 10 has no free option, I’ve decided that I should try to burn some tokens on making a good, performant remote desktop system. I’m targeting moonlight-like performance with Windows RDP-like user experience. Cross-platform.

https://github.com/x3haloed/ascry

I don’t need my particular repo to be the one where this gets solved, but now that coding agents are really good, we shouldn’t have to put up with paying for shit software anymore, IMO.

404 for me

404

Did the same thing. Added the exact features I wanted/needed to the FreeRDP client and had Claude generate a lightweight server from scratch. Bye, bye, TeamViewer, Windows RDP, and RealVNC.

Not enough people want to pay for VDI basically, certainly compared to how much it costs to maintain it. SPICE at the time that we abandoned it "only" supported 2D and video compression, which is complicated enough, but everyone wanted 3D support which would have added another labyrinthine stack on top.

Also the code at the time was a massive security nightmare, written with no validation of fields in the network protocol. It was unmarshalling stuff off the network and sending it directly to X11 libs without even bounds checking. (I sincerely hope this has improved.)

With that said, I wish the project well. SPICE is a much better user experience than VNC, especially if you're looking for something that supports audio, video and USB passthru.

and insecure by default

I used to use x2goserver which was and still is awesome.

These days I prefer docker-based KASM Workspaces, or if you just want a nice GUI over your "bare-metal" VM or server then KasmVNC is great and easy to setup (not that KASM Workspaces is hard to setup)

https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm https://github.com/kasmtech/KasmVNC

I guess I hadn't been paying attention. Is this just the Windows SPICE client that Red Hat has abandoned, or are they moving toward dropping SPICE altogether? Does Red Hat no longer have a VDI product? (I'm sure they did at one point.)

Regardless, thanks for picking this up, OP.

Yes, Red Hat dropped SPICE support quite some time ago. Apparently in RHEL 8.3: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5414901 It's definitely not part of any current Red Hat product. See my other reply for why this is.

I don't think we have a VDI product as such, assuming you discount VNC which we do support but is hardly a full VDI solution.

The major challenge is not keep it building and compatible. The major challenge is to keep up with security issues.

I wish op all the best, it's a tough journey

Why the pony with the hat if they do not sponsor it.

Because it's funny.

Humor does appear to be rather subjective in this case.

I think all humour is.

I think it gives the wrong impression, as they actually abandoned it.

Deprecation of SPICE was news to me. Issue thread on the removal:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2030592

I wish somebody would build a C version of xpra which does only has the client side for latency hiding and manages the remote caching using X11 messages only.

Who named this project? SPICE - the circuit emulator - is one of the oldest and most well known open source projects id all time.

That ship sailed 20 years ago.

Is there a good alternative to SPICE beside VNC?

Can you simulate circuits in VNC ?

That is one creepy image.

Yeah - was the brony/furry mascot original to the service or added by OP?

Its the OP's profile picture, edited with a Red Hat fedora.

Specifically, this looks like a drawing of the character Fluttershy. If it is an OC mascot, that would be weird because it looks just like her.

It is OC with an obvious, heavy influence.

Mad Hattershy.

Probably not everyone's thing, but nice layout and color choice! I like the way how it slightly overlaps the surrounding text, but doesn't make it unreadable.

SCNR :D

The lack of a decent SPICE client for mac is disappointing, it’s one if my greatest proxmox frustrations

Edit: great work on this fork, by the way.

There's one that at least works fairly well, but it's paid. aSPICE Pro.

I found this, but I've not tested it. https://github.com/Ching367436/spice-mac

I'd rather you refuse to let ViGEmBus die. :)

I said all there is to say about it a while ago :P

redhat spice driver was always touch and go — like every other linux well poisoning they do.

x11rdp has been good to me.

You mean the closed source code that Red Hat acquired when we bought Qumranet for $100 million, then open sourced, maintained at a loss for many years, and is now (still) open source and available to everyone to use as they wish?

Whether RH paid $100M for this well poisoning, or however much more/less it pays its staff developers to do the same (i.e. wayland, systemd...), the effect is the same: more churn & instability in the Linux space.

SPICE is not in any danger of dying; it's the thing every analog EE uses to simulate their circuits, and has been for 40 years. This remote desktop thing needs to change its name.

The page doesn't make what SPICE is for obvious, aside from linking to other pages, but they are not talking about the circuit simulation tool. (It appears to be some sort of tool for accessing desktops of virtual machines remotely.)

I have the impression that you could also use it for accessing desktops of real machines remotely, too, but that's only because I keep running into it when I'm looking for information about the real SPICE, a 50-year-old open-source program used to design every computer you've ever used and for which the IEEE awarded Donald Pedersen the Medal of Honor.

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