Plans for SPICE

[kalsan]

It is with great regret that we saw RedHat deprecate the amazing SPICE protocol. Since we use SPICE a lot with our Proxmox instance, we are worried that Proxmox might remove SPICE from a future version.

How does Proxmox intend to treat SPICE in the next years? If SPICE support is going to be removed, will it still be possible to compile it manually?

Best,
Kalsan

 

[LnxBil]

This depends on what happens upstream. RHEL is deprecating it, but who is / was the main developer behind SPICE itself?

 

[dcsapak]

i cannot look into the future, but i think as long as qemu supports it and there are debian packages for the protocol + server, and there is no better (open source) protocol to replace it, we'll continue to support it (at least for the foreseeable future)

 

[kalsan]

Thank you for your replies! Let's cross fingers then

 

[janssensm]

Thanks @kalsan for informing, I first read about deprecating SPICE by Redhat in your post.
Apart from the informative reponse from @dcsapak, I was still curious about the actual status from the Redhat side. Details missed in this post so I dug up a bit of info on the Redhat website.

First notice of official deprecating is in RHEL 8.3 [0]
Most recent RHEL 8 release is 8.6 [1]

Excerpt from [1] for archival , including non-public bugzilla reference.

SPICE has been deprecated
The SPICE remote display protocol has become deprecated. Note that SPICE will remain supported in RHEL 8, but Red Hat recommends using alternate solutions for remote display streaming:

• For remote console access, use the VNC protocol.
• For advanced remote display functions, use third party tools such as RDP, HP RGS, or Mechdyne TGX.

(BZ#1849563)

So the possitive news is that it will stay available and supported in RHEL 8.
Full support for 8 ends on May 31, 2024, so major software changes probably until that date roughly.
And maintenance support ends on May 31, 2029, for minor updates.
But this is just on their own product. Let´s hope all changes will indeed keep trickling down to the packages.

As a sidenote, [1] states that virt-manager is deprecated too, recommending cockpit as alternative.

Also a CentOS forum post [2]

[0] https://access.redhat.com/documenta...lease#deprecated-functionality_virtualization
[1] https://access.redhat.com/documenta...ality#deprecated-functionality_virtualization
[2] https://forums.centos.org/viewtopic.php?t=78970

 

[proxdang]

As it is 2024 now, I still see SPICE supported in debian 12 has an updated version (from debian 11). The windows virtio ISO (which has the spice drives for windows) was last updated September 2023. The were preview version in Jan 2023 as well as 3 separate builds in 2022.

After the redhat announcement there has been 3 updates.

RHEL 9 is not suppose to have SPICE within it.

I see some newer packages for SPICE in Trixie (which is in development)