1.170. qspice

Updated qspice packages that fix several bugs are now available.

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.

These updated packages fix the following bugs:

* the SPICE server uses a heuristic method for detecting video streams. Some sites, however, send two video frame pixmaps: the actual size of the frame and a variant that measures from the top-left of the web-page presenting the frame to the bottom-right of the video frame. Receiving two video pixmaps caused the SPICE heuristic to fail to detect the video stream. This failure also caused a dramatic increase in CPU use and network traffic. With this update, the heuristic detects dual-pixmap video streams accurately; video playback occurs as expected and CPU use and network traffic no longer spike. (BZ#521791)

* previously the SPICE server used a fixed bit-rate for video streams. If external factors affected the data stream, this fixed bit-rate resulted in dropped frames and low quality playback. With this update, the SPICE server no longer uses a hard-coded bit-rate; instead it can choose a bit-rate that reflects current network conditions, improving video playback in low-bandwidth conditions. (BZ#521792)

* on new client connections the SPICE server previously sent the client an uncompressed initial screen image. In low bandwidth conditions this resulted in a long period of apparent inactivity, with the client presenting an unsuable black screen. The SPICE server now compresses the initial screen image, greatly reducing initialization time. (BZ#522049)

Users requiring remote display capabilities for KVM hypervisors are advised to upgrade to these updated qspice packages, which resolve these issues.

Updated qspice packages that fix various bugs are now available.

The Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE), a remote display protocolis used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for viewing virtualized guests running on the KVM hypervisor or on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisors.

The updated packages fix the following bugs:

* previously, if some sites sent two video frame pixmaps, the SPICE heuristic failed to detect the video stream and caused a dramatic increase in CPU use and network traffic. With this update, the dual-pixmap video streams is detected, video playback occurs as expected and CPU use and network traffic no longer spike. (BZ#518193)

* the SPICE server previously used a fixed bit-rate for video streams. If external factors affected the data stream, thi resulted in dropped frames and low quality playback. With this update, the SPICE server no longer uses a hard-coded bit-rate; instead it can choose a bit-rate that reflects current network conditions, improving video playback in low-bandwidth conditions. (BZ#518388)

* the SPICE server previously sent a new client connections an uncompressed initial screen image. In low bandwidth conditions this resulted in a long period of apparent inactivity, with the client presenting an unusable black screen. The SPICE server now compresses the initial screen image, greatly reducing initialization time. (BZ#521488)

* if configured with SSL, previously a SPICE client would open SSL with DEFLATE compression and the server would accept the compression, resulting in a poor display. Currently, if the client offers SSL compression, the compression is not accepted by the server. (BZ#482111)

* the video compression algorithm can start when the guest is accessing text instead of video causing the text to be blurry. The SPICE server now has an improved heuristic for distinguishing between videos and textual streams. (BZ#493375)

* VM run on loaded host crashed when SPICE session opened from RHEV Manager Local-Host [trap divide error 0]. (BZ#525055)

* sometimes a client was timed out if the server was overloaded or due to low bandwidth. Client time-out has been increased to 15 seconds to prevent this.(BZ#526458)

* qemu crashed when OpenOffice 3.1.1 launched .odp files. (BZ#545862)

* qspice provides an implementation of the qspice server, not the client (which is provided by the spice-client package). Previous qspice builds, however, included spice-client directories and files. These unnecessary files and directories were removed from the qspice package for this update. (BZ#549532)

* destination server authentication during migration process is now supported. The SPICE server sends destination server identity to the client which uses it to authenticate the server.(BZ#549673)

* previous qemu and SPICE server crashes were caused by wrong access to ring items in the code. These have since been resolved. (BZ#551580 and

BZ#559207)

* a video streaming issue caused display of an unclean Welcome button on log-out on a Windows 7 guest. A lower limit to streamable images prevents streaming of images that are probably textual.(BZ#558270)

* in Windows media player 12 full screen mode small videos are scaled directly and sent to the client. SPICE server identified the scaled images as "artificial" and did not stream them. A more permissive heuristic now enables these to be streamed. (BZ#562744)

Users requiring remote display capabilities for KVM hypervisors are advised to upgrade to these updated qspice packages which resolve the above issues.