Red Hat released to the open source community its SPICE protocol
for virtual
desktops.
SPICE, or Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment, is
a core
component in the Linux distributor's Enterprise Virtualization for
Desktops
product, which is currently in beta and is scheduled for general
availability
next year. Red Hat took possession of SPICE in the September 2008
acquisition of Qumranet.
The technology is designed for desktops which use remote servers
for data
processing. SPICE improves the user experience when rendering
bandwidth-intensive applications, such as video or voice over
IP.
"The SPICE protocol is designed to optimize performance by
automatically
adapting to the graphics and communications environment that it is
running in,
so vendors have a terrific opportunity to enhance it for their
specific
applications," Brian Stevens, chief technology officer at Red Hat,
said in a
statement released Wednesday.
As a Linux distributor, Red Hat's release of technology to the open
source
community is not unusual, given its close collaboration with the
group on
product development. In fact, the company in October filed a friend
of the court
brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to uphold a lower
court's ruling
that software isn't patentable.
Last month, Red Hat jumped into the virtualization management field
with the
introduction of Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers. The
centralized
management system is aimed at IT shops virtualizing servers based
on the KVM
hypervisor built into Linux.
Red Hat added support for KVM, or kernel virtual machine, in
Enterprise Linux
5.4, which the company released in September. Red Hat also offers a
stand-alone
version of the KVM hypervisor and a drastically slimmed down
version of RHEL 5.4 for server virtualization projects.