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Description of problem:

service spice-vdagentd won't start on guest running on 5.6 kvm.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

spice-vdagent-0.6.3-5

How reproducible:

obtain rhel 6 guest running on rhel 5.6 managed by rhevm 2.3

Steps to Reproduce:
1. boot guest
2. service spice-vdagentd start
3. service spice-vdagentd status
  
Actual results:

service is stopped

Expected results:

service should be running

Additional info:

See attached irc.log

Thanks for the bug report. I've discussed this inside the team. The problem is with the channel between spice-server and the agent process inside the guest. For newer versions of spice-server/qemu this channel runs through a virtio serial port, but for older versions of spice-server/qemu such as those in a 5.6 based hypervisor, it runs through a special vdiport pci device.

The problem is that there is no Linux kernel driver for this vdiport pci device, thus fixing this would require writing such a kernel driver, getting it merged upstream and then backporting it to the RHEL-6 kernel. So we've come to the conclusion that supporting the agent on hypervisors which do not offer the new virtio serial port agent channel, is not worth the effort.

IOW (and I will update the errata text for this) the Linux spice-vdagent needs a hypervisor based on RHEL-6.1 or newer to function.

For testing you could test it against Fedora-14 as host, if you do please wait till bug 643311 is resolved in Fedora (an update fixing this is expected this week).

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