5.310. spice-xpi
Enhanced spice-xpi packages are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The spice-xpi package provides the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) extension for Mozilla that allows the SPICE client to be used from a web browser.
The Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) is a remote display protocol designed for virtual environments. SPICE users can view a virtualized desktop or server from the local system or any system with network access to the server. SPICE is available for a variety of machine architectures and operating systems.
SPICE is used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for viewing virtualized guests running on the KVM hypervisor or on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisors.
The spice-xpi packages have been upgraded to upstream version 2.7, which provides a number of enhancements over the previous version. In particular, the SPICE client started by the SPICE Firefox extension can now be configured through the update-alternatives mechanism. The currently available alternatives are spice-client and remote-viewer. (BZ#784846)
Enhancements
- BZ#752090
- The SPICE Firefox extension is now able to handle requests from the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portal to enable or disable passing the Ctrl+Alt+Delete key combination to the guest operating system and to pass those requests to the SPICE client.
- BZ#641828
- The SPICE Firefox extension is now able to handle requests from the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portal to enable or disable smartcard passthrough to the guest operating system and to pass those requests to the SPICE client.
- BZ#807303
- The SPICE Firefox extension is now able to handle requests from the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portal to enable or disable native USB redirection to the guest operating system and to pass those requests to the SPICE client.
- BZ#747313
- The SPICE Firefox extension is now able to handle requests from the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portal to enable or disable some graphical effects to the guest operating system and to pass those requests to the SPICE client. Disabling these effects can improve performance on WANs.
- BZ#790416, BZ#823578
- The SPICE Firefox extension is now able to correctly compose SSL channel names used for a SPICE session. Prior to this update, removing the prefix "s" was done only for channel names "main" and "inputs". The improvement consists of removing the prefix "s" from all the SSL channel names.
- BZ#813231
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 includes an improved SPICE client called remote-viewer. This update changes the spice-xpi package to now require this improved client instead of requiring the spice-client package. As a result, when installing or upgrading spice-xpi, the virt-viewer package (containing the remote-viewer client) is installed instead of the spice-client package. The client that spice-xpi uses can be selected through the update-alternatives mechanism.
- BZ#753155
- The SPICE Firefox extension now provides log messages when spice-xpi functions are called from a web page using JavaScript and for command line processes that spice-xpi runs (for example, spice-xpi-client). Whenever a web page calls the spice-xpi function, a DEBUG level message is written to the logs. It includes all variables that are passed to spice-xpi. By default, logs are written to the file "spice-xpi.log" in the "~/.spicec" directory; however, the log location can be changed by settings in the "logger.ini" file in the "/etc/spice/" directory.
Users of spice-xpi are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which add these enhancements.
