Spice Up Your Virtual Desktop

When Red Hat acquired Qumranet about 15 months ago lots of people realized that RedHat’s good practice of Open Sourcing everything they do might be a difficult task for the Qumranet software. And indeed, RedHat has been critised a lot for having a Windows only management framework for their Qumranet based technologies and for not opening up Spice yet.

But it came trough on their promise, as of now you can go to the fresh Spice Space page, part of the RedHat emerging Technology Projects at et.redhat.com

“The Spice project aims to provide a complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktop devices.The Spice project deals with both the virtualized devices and the front-end. Interaction between front-end and back-end is done using VD-Interfaces. The VD-Interfaces (VDI) enable both ends of the solution to be easily utilized by a third-party component. ”
The 3 goals of spice are :

a). To deliver a high-quality user experience, similar to local machine, in LAN environments
b). To maintain low CPU consumption in order to have high VM density on the host
c). To provide high-quality video streaming and 3D

A bit later than the main page also the Wiki and the GiT repository became public

The 0.4.0 Spice version is the first Public release is currently available in source or as packages for Fedora 12

Currently, the project main focus is to provide high-quality remote access to QEMU virtual machines. Seeking to help break down the barriers to virtualization adoption by overcoming traditional desktop virtualization challenges, emphasizing user experience. For this purpose, Red Hat introduced the SPICE remote computing protocol that is used for Spice client-server communication. Other components developed include QXL display device and driver, etc.

If you want to know more, there is a 12 page document titled Spice For Newbies that should teach you a lot !