RHEA-2012:0956 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

Enhanced spice-xpi packages are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The spice-xpi package provides the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing
Environments (SPICE) extension for Mozilla that allows the SPICE client to be
used from a web browser.

The Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) is a remote
display protocol designed for virtual environments. SPICE users can view a
virtualized desktop or server from the local system or any system with network
access to the server. SPICE is available for a variety of machine architectures
and operating systems.

SPICE is used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for viewing virtualized guests running
on the KVM hypervisor or on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisors.

The spice-xpi packages have been upgraded to upstream version 2.7, which
provides a number of enhancements over the previous version. In particular, the
SPICE client started by the SPICE Firefox extension can now be configured
through the update-alternatives mechanism. The currently available alternatives
are spice-client and remote-viewer. (BZ#784846)

In addition, this update adds the following enhancements:

• The SPICE Firefox extension is now able to handle requests from the Red Hat

Enterprise Virtualization portal to enable or disable passing the
Ctrl+Alt+Delete key combination to the guest operating system and to pass those
requests to the SPICE client. (BZ#752090)

• The SPICE Firefox extension is now able to handle requests from the Red Hat

Enterprise Virtualization portal to enable or disable smartcard passthrough to
the guest operating system and to pass those requests to the SPICE client.
(BZ#641828)

• The SPICE Firefox extension is now able to handle requests from the Red Hat

Enterprise Virtualization portal to enable or disable native USB redirection to
the guest operating system and to pass those requests to the SPICE client.
(BZ#807303)

• The SPICE Firefox extension is now able to handle requests from the Red Hat

Enterprise Virtualization portal to enable or disable some graphical effects to
the guest operating system and to pass those requests to the SPICE client.
Disabling these effects can improve performance on WANs. (BZ#747313)

• The SPICE Firefox extension is now able to correctly compose SSL channel names

used for a SPICE session. Prior to this update, removing the prefix "s" was done
only for channel names "main" and "inputs". The improvement consists of removing
the prefix "s" from all the SSL channel names. (BZ#790416, BZ#823578)

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 includes an improved SPICE client called

remote-viewer. This update changes the spice-xpi package to now require this
improved client instead of requiring the spice-client package. As a result, when
installing or upgrading spice-xpi, the virt-viewer package (containing the
remote-viewer client) is installed instead of the spice-client package. The
client that spice-xpi uses can be selected through the update-alternatives
mechanism. (BZ#813231)

• The SPICE Firefox extension now provides log messages when spice-xpi functions

are called from a web page using JavaScript and for command line processes that
spice-xpi runs (for example, spice-xpi-client). Whenever a web page calls the
spice-xpi function, a DEBUG level message is written to the logs. It includes
all variables that are passed to spice-xpi. By default, logs are written to the
file "spice-xpi.log" in the "~/.spicec" directory; however, the log location can
be changed by settings in the "logger.ini" file in the "/etc/spice/" directory.
(BZ#753155)

Users of spice-xpi are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which add
these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to
use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension 6 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 747313 - spice-xpi: enable passing WAN options to spice-client
• BZ - 753155 - RFE: implement logging to spice-xpi
• BZ - 784846 - Update spice-xpi to 2.7
• BZ - 790416 - don't prepend "s" to secure channels
• BZ - 798283 - Remove trust store file, when spice client quits
• BZ - 813231 - spice-xpi.spec should Requires: virt-viewer instead of spice-client
• BZ - 823578 - spice-xpi: don't prepend "s" to usbredir, smartcard and tunnel channels

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)