I refuse to let SPICE die

NNefarius about 5 hours ago 51 commentsRead Article on github.com

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Discussion (51 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

IndrekR•about 2 hours ago

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

kazinator•about 2 hours ago

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.)

Animats•about 2 hours ago

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.)

rjsw•21 minutes ago

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

kragen•about 2 hours ago

You're absolutely fucking right.

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

weinzierl•about 1 hour ago

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.

classified•about 1 hour ago

dEtermination. Also quite confusing.

chrisandchris•about 2 hours ago

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

Edit: typo

IndrekR•about 2 hours ago

> with visualization on Linux

You mean ‘virtualization’ here, I guess.

nocman•about 1 hour ago

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.

Hizonner•26 minutes ago

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.

pjmlp•about 2 hours ago

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

RobRivera•30 minutes ago

I am happy I am not alone in this

c0l0•about 3 hours ago

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.

matja•about 2 hours ago

> 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.

colechristensen•12 minutes ago

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

johng•about 1 hour ago

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.

franga2000•about 3 hours ago

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.

rwmj•about 2 hours ago

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.

x3haloed•about 2 hours ago

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.

Magniquick•about 2 hours ago

404 for me

CamperBob2•about 1 hour ago

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

indigodaddy•about 2 hours ago

404

Tostino•about 2 hours ago

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.

Daviey•about 1 hour ago

and insecure by default

g8oz•about 2 hours ago

100% agree. VNC is well past its prime.

indigodaddy•about 2 hours ago

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

bityard•about 2 hours ago

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.

rwmj•about 2 hours ago

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.

danilocesar•about 2 hours ago

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

gbraad•about 1 hour ago

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

Nefarius•42 minutes ago

Because it's funny.

kragen•about 2 hours ago

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.

II2II•about 1 hour ago

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.)

kragen•about 1 hour ago

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.

uecker•about 2 hours ago

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.

seymon•about 2 hours ago

Is there a good alternative to SPICE beside VNC?

arisudesu•about 1 hour ago

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

Nefarius•about 1 hour ago

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

woleium•about 2 hours ago

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.

c-hendricks•about 1 hour ago

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

IshKebab•about 2 hours ago

That is one creepy image.

KronisLV•about 2 hours ago

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.

hughes•about 2 hours ago

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

DaSHacka•about 2 hours ago

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

hn92726819•about 1 hour ago

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.

Nefarius•about 1 hour ago

It is OC with an obvious, heavy influence.

Nefarius•about 1 hour ago

SCNR :D

krautburglar•about 2 hours ago

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

x11rdp has been good to me.

rwmj•about 2 hours ago

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?

krautburglar•about 1 hour ago

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.