The Windows SPICE guest agent, originally developed by freedesktop.org and later maintained by Red Hat, has been revived by the community through a new fork hosted on GitHub. This project addresses the lack of upstream maintenance and ensures compatibility with current Windows virtual machines, particularly Windows 11 guests running on Linux environments using QEMU/KVM and SPICE.
The agent offers several key features such as client mouse mode without pointer grabbing, desktop resolution synchronization with the client, clipboard sharing for text and images, and file transfer capabilities into the guest system. It runs as a Windows service named spice-agent, which launches the agent executable in each user session.
Significant improvements include a fix for multi-GPU setups where a physical GPU is passed through alongside the SPICE display device, preventing loss of mouse movement. The project uses GPL-2.0-or-later licensing and retains original copyrights from Red Hat and upstream contributors.
The build process leverages Autotools with MinGW-w64 UCRT64 for producing MSI installers, while CMake and MSVC remain options for local development. Continuous integration is handled via GitHub Actions, which builds, signs, and packages the MSI installer securely using SignRelay to protect code-signing certificates.
Users can install the MSI on Windows 11 SPICE guests to enable features like dynamic desktop resizing, clipboard synchronization, and file transfers. The agent supports upgrades over previous versions and clean uninstallation. The fork also maintains compatibility with Fedora cross-builds, although x86 MSI builds are no longer produced.
This community effort is important as it sustains critical functionality for Windows virtual machines in Linux-based virtualization setups, ensuring a smoother user experience and ongoing support despite the original project's discontinuation.