Bug 91964

Summary:	RFE: Use the tty+libvte instead of a graphics pipe for terminals
Product:	Spice	Reporter:	Alberto Ruiz <aruiz>
Component:	virt-viewer	Assignee:	Spice Bug List <spice-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED MOVED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Alberto Ruiz 2015-09-10 16:43:21 UTC

Given the responsiveness problems terminals have, I often end up using an SSH session instead of the SPICE client, which is not really convenient as it includes extra steps.

My proposal is that we send the ttys over the spice connection so then we can use a VTE widget at the client side instead of using the graphics protocol.

I mentioned this to Fabiano Fidencio and he suggested that I should file this as a RFE here.

Comment 1 Marc-Andre Lureau 2015-09-10 16:50:37 UTC

similar to video passthrough, but for vte.. not sure the benefit is really worth it when bug 91935 will be fixed (for scrolling cases etc).

In theory, when you just type in a terminal, the glyph is cached, so you end up sending a very small amount of info to the client.

Comment 2 Marc-Andre Lureau 2015-09-10 16:52:24 UTC

or do you mean an extra channel not composited in the client display, but rather a different console altogether? this is already possible with spice port, it just needs someone to add vte widget to a client and hook things together (ie, qemu and spice already let you do this).

Comment 3 Alberto Ruiz 2015-09-11 09:24:36 UTC

I mean the latter. I didn't know this was possible.

Basically, a libvte widget would allow reflowing of the terminal text on resize which is not possible through a graphical terminal that is bound to the resolution of the graphical output. So I see some inherent UX benefits here beyond tty data being faster to transfer than graphics. I'm happy to learn that the graphics are going to get faster for terminals.

Can you give me some pointers so that I can see if I can come up with a prototype?

Comment 4 GitLab Migration User 2018-06-05 14:20:08 UTC

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