virt-viewer 11.0 breaks our test suite
Problems
AFAICT it breaks our test suite in at least 2 ways:
Window name has changed
… so Display#active?
does not recognize it anymore.
I could fix it with a patch (untested with older virt-viewer though) that anonym used in !919 (merged).
Client-side decorations change zoom level ⇒ pictures don't match anymore
I could not find a way to fix this yet.
Priority assessment
This impacts Debian sid and Bookworm systems.
- Developers have a workaround (install a package with anonym's patch applied)
- This will block part of Upgrade our infrastructure to Debian 12 (Bookworm) (sysadmin#17982 - closed), unless we apply the same patch there.
Potential solutions
The need that virt-viewer satisfies is to connect to a libvirt/QEMU VM and export its display to a X display, so we can record it, display it (--view
), take screenshots, etc.
- Switch to something simpler than virt-viewer?
- spicy
- Something like
spicy --host=127.0.0.1 --port=5901 --full-screen --display :2
could do the job. - We need to extract the port from libvirt after starting TailsToaster.
- Requires using a custom
~/.config/spicy/settings
to disable scaling.
- Something like
- Remmina
- Not exactly "simpler than virt-viewer" but it supports SPICE and a kiosk option.
- Revert to VNC and use the same VNC viewer that we already use for
--view
.- See b81076a1 for why we switched from VNC to SPICE. That was ages ago so these reasons may very well be outdated.
- Write our own with
gir1.2-spiceclientgtk-3.0
- It does not seem like rocket science, see how virt-manager uses it in Python: https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/main/virtManager/details/viewers.py
- spicy
Edited by intrigeri