The spice guest agent for Linux consists of 2 parts, a system wide daemon spice-vdagentd and a X11 session agent spice-vdagent of which there is one per X11 session.

spice-vdagentd gets started through a Sys-V initscript or a systemd unit.

spice-vdagent gets automatically started in desktop environments which honor /etc/xdg/autostart, and under gdm.

The spice guest agent adds the following features to spice Linux guests:

* Client mouse mode (no need to grab mouse by client, no mouse lag)

* Automatic adjustment of the X11 session's number of virtual monitors, and their resolution, to the number of client windows and their resolution

* Support of copy and paste (text and images) between the active X11 session and the client, this supports both the primary selection and the clipboard

* Support for transfering files from the client to the agent