Hi
Hi folks,
I'm looking for a good way to implement cut+paste support for vnc.
The vnc core protocol has support for text/plain cut+paste, and there
is an extension adding support for other formats. That'll cover one
part of the problem, exchanging cut+paste data between vnc client and
qemu vnc server.
The tricky part is the second: the guest <=> qemu communication.
I see basically two possible approaches here:
(1) Have some guest agent (spice does it that way).
Advantage: more flexible, allows more features.
Disadvantage: requires agent in the guest.
(2) Send text as key events.
Advantage: no guest agent needed.
Disadvantage: is translated by guests keyboard map, so qemu
needs to know the map for proper char -> key event translation.
Only works for text/plain and only for chars you can easily
type, anything needing input methods (emoji 😊 for example)
isn't going to fly.
I think that (1) is clearly the better way. Given that the agent
would need to run in user wayland/xorg session context the existing
qemu-guest-agent will not work. Also linking against some UI library
like gtk3 for clipboard handling is not something we want for the
qemu-guest-agent. So we need another one, I'll name it
qemu-clipboard-agent for the rest of this mail. And we need a
communication channel.
I'd tend to model the qemu-clipboard-agent simliar to the
qemu-guest-agent, i.e. have some stream as communication path and run
some stream protocol over it.
Stream options I see are (in order of personal preference):
(1) New virtio-serial port. virtio-serial likely is there anyway
for the qemu-guest-agent ...
(2) Have qemu-clipboard-agent and qemu-guest-agent share the agent
channel, i.e. qemu-clipboard-agent will proxy everything through
qemu-guest-agent (spice does it that way).
Protocol options I see are (not sure yet which to prefer, need to have
a closer look at the candidates):
(1) Add clipboard commands to QMP and use these.
(2) Reuse the clipboard bits of the vnc protocol (forward
VNC_MSG_CLIENT_CUT_TEXT messages to the guest agent)
(3) Reuse the clipboard bits of the spice-agent protocol.
(4) Reuse the clipboard bits of the wayland protocol.
Once we have sorted the qemu <-> guest communication path it should be
possible to also hook up other UIs (specifically gtk) without too much
effort. Which probably makes (2) a rather poor choice.
Comments?
Suggestions?
Other ideas?
I also had recently some thoughts about how to implement clipboard sharing in a more general way for QEMU.
I admit I like Christophe's suggestion ("it's somebody else problem"), but it falls short to me as I don't know of a common open-source remoting solution for various operating systems, and I don't see how it could integrate well with our UI and remote protocols. Or look at reusing some VirtualBox code perhaps?
Some things I keep in mind:
- the spice protocol had a number of iterations to fix some races. It would be great not to repeat the same mistakes, and I don't know if VNC have the same flaws or not.
- the spice agent design isn't great: the system agent proxies messages to the active session. It would be nice if the new solution didn't have such a middle-man.
- with wayland, clipboard sharing isn't really possible. Or not in a seamless way at least. Today it kinda works with some X11 compatibility extensions, but this will eventually go away or change behaviour.
- it's not just about clipboard. We would also want to have some kind of drag and drop (even if limited to files like Spice atm). We may want some windowing integration. We may also want to have access to some desktop services: apps, documents etc.. And what's not.
That leads me to think that virtio-serial is not very well suited, as it doesn't allow various services / processes to come and go. I see vsock as a much better alternative. (I also wonder if it handles control flow any better btw)
I think we shoud work on getting the free desktops our best-class support. To me, this means we need to speak the lingua franca, which is DBus. The great thing is that DBus is also equipped to handle services that come and go, handling discovery, introspection etc. Various services are already available. As mentioned earlier, that's what the GNOME desktop will offer for clipboard sharing. There are good chances other desktops will follow if that design works, as it should be easy for them to implement the same service. That means good reuse of existing desktop code. Speaking DBus on Windows, MacOS or Android isn't an issue. However, vsock support may be a bit tricky atm.
Oh and of course, since this is a new daemon, it would be really a shame not to write it in a modern language (hint! ;-).
Hope that helps,