libvirt with SPICE on 12.04 amd64

Question

I'm using 12.04 LTS amd64 as a KVM host + desktop. I have a Windows 7 ultimate 64bit guest on this host. The installation worked perfect with the default (VNC display) settings. Everything also works very well over a RDP session (using rdesktop) to the box, including sound and video. Netflix, however, can detect somehow that I'm on a remote desktop session so it fails at the "buffering" stage to launch the movie. I wanted to try out SPICE as a workaround for this, but when I switch the guest display over to SPICE it fails to launch with :

Error starting domain: unsupported configuration: spicevmc not supported in this QEMU binary

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 45, in cb_wrapper
    callback(asyncjob, *args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 66, in tmpcb
    callback(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/domain.py", line 1120, in startup
    self._backend.create()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/libvirt.py", line 551, in create
    if ret == -1: raise libvirtError ('virDomainCreate() failed', dom=self)
libvirtError: unsupported configuration: spicevmc not supported in this QEMU binary

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

You'll have to install the following packages to use SPICE in Ubuntu 12.04 / (tested up to 14.04):

• python-spice-client-gtk - GTK2 widget for SPICE clients (Python bindings)

  This is needed for the graphical Virt-manager application.

• qemu-kvm-spice - Full virtualization on amd64 hardware
• spice-client - Implements the client side of the SPICE protocol
• spice-client-gtk - Simple clients for interacting with SPICE

From the command line:

sudo apt-get install python-spice-client-gtk qemu-kvm-spice \
                     spice-client spice-client-gtk

Then reload the Libvirt service:

sudo service libvirt-bin restart

and don't forget to close and restart your Virt-manager application.

Answer 2

I found the answer here : https://launchpad.net/~bderzhavets/+archive/lib-usbredir87

Thank you Boris Derzhavets!

Answer 3

Despite what many posts say, qemu-system-x86_64-spice (v1.0.50) works fine on Ubuntu 12.04 without any special PPA's and such, just a:

apt-get install qemu-kvm-spice

Getting it running on a Windows VM, required 3 boots, each incrementally installing more drivers. I copied the relevant command-line parameters off this Gentoo thread: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-949642-start-0.html - and downloaded the latest versions of the guest-tools and viewers. The SPICE qemu binary also complained about a missing firmware file, which I downloaded from https://germa939-limbopc.googlecode.com/git-history/371c259a4d8fa8e6682b4dc87d7e85a440f7c12a/assets/roms/kvmvapic.bin and placed in /usr/share/kvm; I'm not sure what it does or if it was necessary.

I also ran into a black-screen problem on first connection after installing the spice guest tools, but giving it a good few minutes to boot up, (it's very slow before it goes active) - it worked. (I doubt logging in to the VM with Terminal Service Remote Desktop triggered everything, but it at least confirmed that the VM booted properly.)

SPICE is great - it makes the VM use around 60% less CPU and offers a true native experience, albeit it uses between 100kbps and 80Mbps depending on what's happening on the screen, although you will probably prefer it above Terminal Services and VNC if you have 5-10Mbps available downstream. A huge plus is the shared clipboard.

The viewer seems to be universally in a package called "virt-viewer", and the actual command on linux being "remote-viewer", requiring a full "spice://ip:port" URL.