Ubuntu Wiki

Overview

Spice is an alternative to vnc offering high performance graphics and audio ideal for desktop virtualization.

Spice in qemu on Ubuntu

Spice is not in the Ubuntu main repository, while qemu-kvm is. Therefore, qemu-kvm cannot be linked against spice. Instead, the 'qemu-kvm-spice' package is built from the qemu-linaro sources. To use spice, you must run 'kvm-spice', not 'kvm'. Since qemu-linaro is based on qemu.git, which by default chooses tcg (unaccelerated qemu), you must use the '-enable-kvm' flag to get accelerated kvm. An example command line would be:

qemu-kvm-spice -enable-kvm -m 2G -drive file=x.img,if=virtio,cache=none -vga qxl -spice port=5900,disable-ticketing [...]

Spice in libvirt on Ubuntu

To use spice in libvirt, use an .xml such as that at http://people.canonical.com/~serge/spice.xml. If you have a working vnc-based guest defined in libvirt, and want to switch it to use spice, use the emulator line:

    <emulator>/usr/bin/kvm-spice</emulator>

and replace the graphics and videos sections with:

    <graphics type='spice' port='5930' tlsPort='-1' autoport='no'/>
    <video>
      <model type='qxl' vram='65536' heads='1'/>
      <alias name='video0'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x0'/>
    </video>