spice not supported on ppc64el or s390x on stein

[Nick Moffitt]

When setting console-access-protocol to 'spice' in the stein charms on bionic, we got the following error from ppc64el and s390x compute nodes when people tried starting instances:

Failed to start libvirt guest: libvirt.libvirtError: unsupported configuration: spice graphics are not supported with this QEMU

It seems that at least ppc64el is supported in QEMU 4.0, but the stein repo only includes a 3.1 package. I can see that qemu-system-ppc_4.0+dfsg-0ubuntu7~cloud0_ppc64el.deb is in the pool, but the 3.1 package has a generation number so I'm not sure what the status of these versions is.

I have not investigated s390x support for spice in qemu versions.

Is it possible to get bionic/stein upgraded to where it can support spice on all architectures?

[James Page (james-page)]

stein is aligned with package versions in disco, so will remain on qemu 3.1.

train will ship with qemu 4.0.

That said I have memory that console access is not generally supported in ppc64el or s390x and that virtual serial console is the only option.

[Ryan Beisner (1chb1n)]

Agree, I recall the same, but we will find out and circle back with definitive information.

[Tom Haddon (mthaddon)]

A related question - the juju config option for `enable-serial-console` says "Enable serial console access to instances using websockets (insecure)". In what sense is it insecure and is there any way to mitigate that?