[vbox-dev] SPICE vs VRDP performance?

[Huihong Luo]

Thanks, Klaus.
 
Basically, since RDP is extensible, it can achieve whatever (or most) features SPICE can do, right? Consider every Windows PC already has the client, I would say RDP is supposed to be the way to go.
 
For example, does vbox's remote USB utilize some kind of extended feature of RDP?
 
I guess I wanted to find out if there are some kind of limits of RDP.

--- On Thu, 5/20/10, Klaus Espenlaub <Klaus.Espenlaub at Sun.COM> wrote:


From: Klaus Espenlaub <Klaus.Espenlaub at Sun.COM>
Subject: Re: [vbox-dev] SPICE vs VRDP performance?
To: "Huihong Luo" <huisinro at yahoo.com>
Cc: vbox-dev at virtualbox.org
Date: Thursday, May 20, 2010, 10:41 AM


Huihong Luo wrote:
> Can anyone shed some lights about the performance between kvm's SPICE and VRDP protocols? If SPICE is ported to vbox, would it have better performance?

No one is able to tell what performance it could deliver. When I had a look at the sources I immediately thought that it won't be easy to interface it efficiently with the way VirtualBox works. This was quite some time ago, and didn't feel the urge to check again since.

When I last had a peek at SPICE it was to a large proportion a list of cool features which were not 'yet' implemented. This might have changed by now, however I never understood why the world needs yet another protocol. RDP could easily be extended to accommodate most SPICE specific features only if someone would see the benefit - it is happening actually. MS does keep the RDP specs up to date, and is adding useful new features. The basic design (from the ITU T.120 set of standards) makes it very flexible and extensible. Lots of clever people contributed to this.

> According to this video, SPICE seems to consume much more network bandwidth than Microsoft RDP.
>  http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/gabeknuth/archive/2009/06/18/redhat-spice-vs-rdp-vs-ica-performance-video.aspx

I've seen the benchmark videos, and I still don't know what value to attribute to them. They measured something, but so far I couldn't make up my mind if it is releavant or not. Maybe it's the presentation form they're chosen which I don't like.

> The reason I asked this question, is to explore whether it's worth the efforts to make SPICE to work with vbox.

Cannot really comment whether it's worth doing.

I was immediately and completely put off by the licensing nightmare the developers created there. Different licenses all over the place, lots of files without even the faintest hint who wrote it, leave alone having a license statement. This looks to me like a time bomb. In that form there's no way to get this through the legal review process of a software company.


Klaus

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