Red Hat Abandoned SPICE, So One Developer Refuses to Let It Die
I refuse to let SPICE die
Red Hat stopped maintaining upstream SPICE, but a community fork of the Windows guest agent keeps it alive. This repository mirrors the abandoned freedesktop.org vd_agent and adds fixes for Windows 11 VMs on Linux, including a multi-GPU mouse fix. It provides clipboard sharing, file transfer, dynamic resolution, and a Windows service. The fork is GPL-2.0-or-later and builds via MSYS2 UCRT64 with signed releases through GitHub Actions.
Red Hat no longer maintains upstream SPICE. This fork keeps the Windows agent building and shipping for current guests, especially Windows 11 VMs on Linux.
- IndrekR
Major confusion for me, as SPICE is well known circuit simulator:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE
Using it often. Mostly via ngspice nowadays:
- c0l0
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.
- franga2000
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.
- indigodaddy
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)
- bityard
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.