[winswitch] [Spice-devel] Use spice to show individual X clients like xpra does?

[Marc-André Lureau]

Hi

----- Original Message -----
> Hi,
> 
> I've played around a bit with xpra[1]. Xpra (AFAIK) starts an X server with a
> dummy video driver (or xvfb?) on the remote machine and a client xpra process
> on the local machine shows remote application windows just like they would
> run
> locally.
> 
> [1] http://xpra.org
> 
> Xpra also forwards sound, clipboard and microfon. So it seems to me that
> there
> is some overlap with spice.
> 
> It would be cool, if I could use spice in the same way, to see virtual
> machine
> X clients integrated in my local desktop just like local applications. Is
> this
> on your roadmap?

It would be really nice to have, but nobody is working on this afaik.

The current spice project is more designed toward driver level, rather than application level. You'd need to have a per-window drawing context in order to be able to display the seamless apps correctly. On Windows, it would probably need user-space gdi (&directx) hooks (somehow a bit like wine).  Older methods just clip the remote windows with help of the window manager, however this is quite limited (see seamlessrdp or virtualbox seamless mode etc). I haven't looked at xpra, it would be interesting to see if and how they manage this per-window context. Perhaps it is possible to extend Xspice similarly? but I suppose it is rather done at higher level (application or X server frontend).