On Sun, Apr 01, 2012 at 12:27:13PM +0100, Lee Essen wrote: > > On 30 Mar 2012, at 22:16, Alon Levy wrote: > > > On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 05:12:26PM +0100, Lee Essen wrote: > >> Hi, > >> > >> I'm relatively new to spice, and am using it very effectively with qemu, > >> however it strikes me that there is potential to use it as a standalone > >> embedded server for applications who only have a remote display > >> requirement. The obvious candidate is probably some kind of broker, but > >> I'm sure there are many other examples. > >> > >> Has anyone considered this? Am I missing the point? (which wouldn't be the > >> first time!) > >> > >> If the "primitives" are relatively easy to get at, then surely it wouldn't > >> be such a tough challenge to build something like an SDL layer for it? > > > > Are you talking about using Spice as a sort of graphics toolkit? I don't > > think that's impossible, but I think the right approach here would be to > > write something like a gtk/qt backend (for gtk there is already broadway > > [1], so yet another backend, but this time using spice). > > Yes, exactly. That's why I suggested an SDL layer (backend is probably a > better word), but I guess gtk would also be ok -- or even just a simple set > of primitives for basic stuff. > > I hadn't heard of broadway … very nice, the principle is exactly the same. > > > If you want to remote an application without a vm you can already use > > Xspice [2] for it too, but it is not at the level I think you are talking > > about (but perhaps will suit you). > > > > [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/15/gtk-html-backend-update/ > > [2] http://spice-space.org/download.html#Xspice > > My main thought is around some kind of spice broker, you could probably build > it pretty easily into the front-end, but I can't help thinking it would be > nice to be able to have the client not care about this and just present it > through the normal spice mechanisms - that way any client would work. > > I can't easily see where to attempt to plug-in ... the code seems pretty > determined to have the QXL interface in there, so does it make sense to > pretend to be the qxl driver? Or is there any easier place? >
What would inventing another toolkit achieve? If a toolkit was to be invented I think it should be a scene graph based one, something like what Zack Rustin suggested in a blog post once [3], but the current level that qxl handles is way lower then that. It could be done in the spice protocol but would probably require a display channel v2. That said, you could of course pretend to be qxl and write a library on top of that, that would then be used by gui applications, or as a backend to gtk/qt and thus support all existing gtk/qt applications. SDL - Why do you treat it as a graphics toolkit? it is much lower level then that afair. [3] http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2010/11/2d-musings.html > Cheers, > > Lee. _______________________________________________ Spice-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/spice-devel
