oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/propolis

VNC/RFB: pixel formats other than truecolor are not supported

Open
#868 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

bug
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
270
Forks
42
Avg merge
4d 5h
Merged PRs (30d)
6

Description

i tried connecting by pointing my client, RealVNC Viewer, at propolis-server. this mostly works, but at least RealVNC defaults to an 8ppp format it calls rgb222. rfb then can't convert that to a FourCC and errors with format is not 4-bytes-per-pixel truecolor. fair enough!

for refernce, the pixel format that RealVNC Viewer sent was:

PixelFormat {
  bits_per_pixel: 8,
  depth: 6,
  big_endian: false,
  color_spec: ColorFormat(ColorFormat {
    red_max: 3,
    green_max: 3,
    blue_max: 3,
    red_shift: 4,
    green_shift: 2,
    blue_shift: 0
  })
}

i coaxed RealVNC into sending a pixel format we can work with by going to Properties->Expert and overriding the parameter ColorLevel to full.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start at the rfb pixel-format conversion path used by propolis-server and reproduce the failure with RealVNC Viewer using its default rgb222 format. Trace how the supplied PixelFormat is rejected, then verify that non-truecolor formats are accepted and rendered correctly without the FourCC error.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
networking
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.