libvirt support

Hello

There was some discussion about this on Windows earlier.

A direct integration of libvirt is tricky because of the way it is licensed. A reimplementation of the SPICE protocol is a huge chunk of work; sadly the demand for this does not currently support the engineering effort required (we've had very few requests for this).

Currently the only solution would be to use a command-line entry to launch an external application (like virt viewer), but of course it won't be a true integration. Is there a specific application you use currently? Are you aware of any other (permissively licensed) implementations of the SPICE protocol?

Please let me know if you have any questions or something isn't clear

Kind regards,

The currently prebuilt and via brew shipped version of libvirt doesn't include SPICE. aka the MacOS version of libvirt doesn't currently support SPICE. (or better the qemu package doesn't, as libvirt is only an api layer to start/stop it for the most part. The hypervisor framework from apple probably also doesn't use spice but I'm not entirely sure about that). So that shouldn't be an issue until now at least. I tried to compile it with spice but I'm currently stuck at a dependency of a dependency of it and probably need to find some replacement as that library doesn't properly build on/for MacOS. I haven't invested any time since then, but that's probably also the reason why it is currently not included in the version shipped by the (Home)brew project.

Also could you provide some more details about this licensing issue? The libvirt website says it is GNU LGPL licensed, so that should technically be enough. Or not?

Hello again

I see that the main project is now licensed under LGPL (perhaps this changed at some point between the last thread I linked), but it also mentions that parts of the codebase are still GPL. That would require careful analysis on our side.

If you're not using SPICE (if the brew version doesn't include it), what's your use case for libvirt? How do you use it?

Thanks and kind regards,