Date: 2015-10-20T03:12:01

User’s Guide for TurboVNC 2.0.1

- 1 Legal Information
- 2 Conventions Used in This Document
- 3 Overview
- 4 System Requirements
  - 4.1 Linux/x86 and Other x86 Un*x Operating Systems
  - 4.2 Mac/x86
  - 4.3 Windows
- 5 Obtaining and Installing TurboVNC
  - 5.1 Installing TurboVNC on Linux
  - 5.2 Installing the TurboVNC Viewer on OS X
  - 5.3 Installing the TurboVNC Viewer on Windows
  - 5.4 Installing TurboVNC from Source
  - 5.5 Uninstalling TurboVNC
- 6 Using TurboVNC
  - 6.1 Starting and Connecting to a TurboVNC Session
  - 6.2 Disconnecting and Killing a TurboVNC Session
  - 6.3 Using TurboVNC in a Web Browser
  - 6.4 Deploying the Java TurboVNC Viewer Using Java Web Start
  - 6.5 Securing a TurboVNC Connection
  - 6.6 Further Reading
- 7 Performance and Image Quality
  - 7.1 Interframe Comparison
  - 7.2 Advanced Compression Options
  - 7.3 Lossless Refresh
  - 7.4 Automatic Lossless Refresh
  - 7.5 Multithreading
  - 7.6 Maximizing the Performance of the Java TurboVNC Viewer
- 8 TurboVNC Authentication Extensions
  - 8.1 Enabling Authentication Methods
  - 8.2 Further Reading
- 9 Using TurboVNC with VirtualGL
  - 9.1 Using TurboVNC and VirtualGL on the Same Server
  - 9.2 Using TurboVNC When VirtualGL Is Running on a Different Machine
- 10 Compatibility Guide
  - 10.1 TightVNC or TigerVNC Servers
  - 10.2 TightVNC or TigerVNC Viewers
  - 10.3 RealVNC
- 11 Advanced Configuration
  - 11.1 Server Settings
  - 11.2 Viewer Settings
  - 11.3 Java Viewer Settings

# 1 Legal Information

This document and all associated illustrations are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. Any works that contain material derived from this document must cite The VirtualGL Project as the source of the material and list the current URL for the TurboVNC web site.

The official TurboVNC binaries contain libjpeg-turbo, which is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.

The TurboVNC Windows packages include PuTTY, which is released under this license.

TurboVNC is licensed under the GNU General Public License, v2.

# 2 Conventions Used in This Document

This document assumes that TurboVNC will be installed in the default directory (`/opt/TurboVNC` on Linux/Un*x and Mac systems and `c:\Program Files\TurboVNC` on Windows systems.) If your installation of TurboVNC resides in a different directory, then adjust the instructions accordingly.

# 3 Overview

TurboVNC is a derivative of VNC (Virtual Network Computing) that is tuned to provide peak performance for 3D and video workloads. TurboVNC was originally a fork of TightVNC 1.3.x, and on the surface, the X server and Windows viewer still behave similarly to their parents. However, the current version of TurboVNC contains a much more modern X server code base (based on X.org 7.7) and a variety of other features and fixes, including a high-performance zero-install Java viewer. TurboVNC compresses 3D and video workloads significantly better than the “tightest” compression mode in TightVNC 1.3.x while using only typically 15-20% of the CPU time of the latter. Using non-default settings, TurboVNC can also match the best compression ratios produced by TightVNC 1.3.x for 2D workloads (see Section 7.2.)

All VNC implementations, including TurboVNC, use the RFB (remote framebuffer) protocol to send “framebuffer updates” from the VNC server to any connected “viewers.” Each framebuffer update can contain multiple “rectangles” (regions that have changed since the last update.) As with TightVNC, TurboVNC analyzes each rectangle, splits it into multiple “subrectangles”, and attempts to encode each subrectangle using the “subencoding type” that will provide the most efficient compression, given the number of unique colors in the subrectangle. The process by which TurboVNC does this is referred to as an “encoding method.” A rectangle is first analyzed to determine if any significant portion of it is solid, and if so, that portion is encoded as a bounding box and a fill color (“Solid subencoding.”) Of the remaining subrectangles, those with only two colors are encoded as a 1-bit-per-pixel bitmap with a 2-color palette (“Mono subencoding”), those with low numbers of unique colors are encoded as a color palette and an 8-bit-per-pixel bitmap (“Indexed color subencoding”), and subrectangles with high numbers of unique colors are encoded using either JPEG or arrays of RGB pixels (“Raw subencoding”), depending on the encoding method. zlib can optionally be used to compress the indexed color, mono and raw subrectangles.

Part of TurboVNC’s speedup comes from the use of libjpeg-turbo, the same high-speed SIMD-optimized JPEG codec used by VirtualGL. However, TurboVNC also eliminates the CPU-hungry smoothness detection routines that TightVNC uses to determine whether a subrectangle is a good candidate for JPEG compression, and TurboVNC’s encoding methods tend to favor the use of JPEG more, since it is now generally the fastest subencoding type. Furthermore, TurboVNC eliminates buffer copies, it maximizes network efficiency by splitting framebuffer updates into relatively large subrectangles, and it uses only the zlib compression levels that can be shown to have a measurable performance benefit.

TurboVNC is the product of extensive research, in which many different permutations of the TightVNC encoder were benchmarked at the low level against a variety of captured RFB sessions that simulate real-world application workloads, both 2D and 3D. For more information on the research leading to TurboVNC’s encoder design, see this report.

In addition to high performance, other notable features of TurboVNC include:

- Fine-grained control over the JPEG image quality and the level of chrominance subsampling
- Double buffering on the client side to reduce tearing artifacts in 3D and video applications
- Flexible and configurable full-screen/multi-screen support
- Full support for IPv6
- Advanced flow control and continuous updates. This allows viewers to receive framebuffer updates without specifically requesting them, which can improve performance dramatically on high-latency connections.
- Authentication with one-time passwords or Unix login credentials. Access control lists can be used to share VNC sessions with only certain users.
- TurboVNC allows security/authentication policies to be set globally for a particular server machine.
- Multithreaded Tight encoding
- “Lossless refresh” allows a viewer to request a lossless copy of the current screen image. This is useful in situations in which image quality is critical but the network is too slow to support sending a high-quality image for every frame. Lossless refreshes can be performed manually when a certain hotkey is pressed, or the TurboVNC Server can be configured to send a lossless refresh automatically if the user stops interacting with the application for a certain period of time.
- High-performance zero-install Java viewer, which can be launched via Java Web Start using TurboVNC’s built-in web server or deployed on a dedicated web server. By calling libjpeg-turbo through JNI, the Java TurboVNC Viewer achieves similar levels of performance to the native TurboVNC Viewer, and its performance is generally equal to or better than that of the TigerVNC native viewers.
- The TurboVNC Server and Java TurboVNC Viewer can be used with an instance of the UltraVNC Repeater in Mode I or II.

TurboVNC, when used with VirtualGL, provides a highly performant and robust solution for remotely displaying 3D applications over all types of networks.

On “modern” hardware, TurboVNC is capable of streaming 50+ Megapixels/second over a 100 Megabit/second local area network with perceptually lossless image quality. TurboVNC can stream between 10 and 12 Megapixels/second over a 5 Megabit/second broadband connection at reduced (but usable) image quality.

TurboVNC is compatible with other VNC distributions. See Chapter 10 for more information. The official TurboVNC binaries can be installed onto the same system as other VNC distributions without interference.

# 4 System Requirements

## 4.1 Linux/x86 and Other x86 Un*x Operating Systems

| Server (x86) | Server (x86-64) | Client
--- | --- | --- | ---
Recommended CPU | For optimal performance, the CPU should support SSE2 extensions. Dual processors or dual cores recommended | Dual processors or dual cores recommended | For optimal performance, the CPU should support SSE2 extensions.
O/S | TurboVNC should work with a variety of Linux distributions, FreeBSD, and Solaris, but currently-supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its work-alikes, including CentOS, Oracle Linux, and Scientific Linux), Ubuntu LTS, and SuSE Linux Enterprise tend to receive the most attention from the TurboVNC community.
Other |  |  | For optimal performance, the X server should be configured to export True Color (24-bit or 32-bit) visuals. Java 5 or later (Java 6 or later recommended)

## 4.2 Mac/x86

| Client
--- | ---
Recommended CPU | Any Intel-based Mac
O/S | OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) or later
Other Software | Java for OS X or Oracle Java 8u40 or later (see Section 7.6.3 for more details)

## 4.3 Windows

| Client
--- | ---
Recommended CPU | For optimal performance, the CPU should support SSE2 extensions.
O/S | Windows 2000 SP1 or later
Other | For optimal performance, the client display should have a 24-bit or 32-bit (True Color) color depth.

# 5 Obtaining and Installing TurboVNC

## 5.1 Installing TurboVNC on Linux

### Font Dependencies

On some Linux distributions, most notably Fedora 10 and later, the basic X11 bitmap fonts are not installed by default. Thus, it is necessary to install the `xorg-x11-fonts-misc` package on these distributions prior to starting a TurboVNC session for the first time. Otherwise, TurboVNC will fail with the following error:

    Fatal server error:
    could not open default font 'fixed'

### Installing TurboVNC

1. Download the appropriate TurboVNC binary package for your system from the Files area of the TurboVNC SourceForge project page. Packages are provided for RPM-based and Debian-based Linux distributions that contain GLIBC 2.5 or later (including Fedora 6 or later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS 5 or later, SuSE Linux Enterprise/openSUSE 11 or later, and Ubuntu 8.04 or later.)
2. Log in as root, cd to the directory where you downloaded the binary package, and issue one of the following commands:
   RPM-based systems

         rpm -U turbovnc*.rpm

   Debian-based systems

         dpkg -i turbovnc*.deb

### Installing TurboVNC for a Single User

Download the appropriate binary package, as above, then execute the following commands:

RPM-based systems

      mkdir ~/turbovnc
      cd ~/turbovnc
      rpm2cpio {full path of turbovnc*.rpm} | cpio -idv

Debian-based systems

      dpkg-deb --extract {full path of turbovnc*.deb} ~/turbovnc

Add ~/turbovnc to any paths specified in this document. Note that the TurboVNC security configuration file will not work when TurboVNC is installed in this manner.

## 5.2 Installing the TurboVNC Viewer on OS X

1. Download the TurboVNC Mac disk image (`TurboVNC-``{version}``-OracleJava.dmg` or `TurboVNC-``{version}``-AppleJava.dmg`) from the Files area of the TurboVNC SourceForge project page.

   The “AppleJava” package will work with OS X 10.5 and later. It uses Apple’s distribution of Java, which was pre-installed on versions of OS X prior to 10.7 (but which can be installed on later OS X versions by downloading the “Java for OS X” package from Apple Support.) The “OracleJava” package will work with OS X 10.7 or later and uses the Oracle Java plugin. In order to achieve the best performance possible with the TurboVNC Viewer, you should generally use Apple Java with older Macs and Oracle Java with newer Macs. See Section 7.6.3 for more details.

2. Open the disk image, then open `TurboVNC.pkg` inside the disk image. Follow the instructions to install the Mac TurboVNC Viewer.

## 5.3 Installing the TurboVNC Viewer on Windows

1. Download the TurboVNC Windows installer package (`TurboVNC-``{version}``.exe` for 32-bit systems or `TurboVNC64-``{version}``.exe` for 64-bit systems) from the Files area of the TurboVNC SourceForge project page.
2. Run the TurboVNC installer. The installation of TurboVNC should be self-explanatory. The only configuration option is the directory into which you want the files to be installed.

## 5.4 Installing TurboVNC from Source

If you are using a Linux/Un*x platform for which there is not a pre-built TurboVNC binary package available, then log in as root, download the TurboVNC source tarball (`turbovnc-``{version}``.tar.gz`) from the Files area of the TurboVNC SourceForge project page, uncompress it, `cd turbovnc-``{version}`, and read `BUILDING.txt` for further instructions on how to build TurboVNC from source.

## 5.5 Uninstalling TurboVNC

### Linux

As root, issue one of the following commands:

RPM-based systems

      rpm -e turbovnc

Debian-based systems

      dpkg -r turbovnc

### OS X

Open the “Uninstall TurboVNC” application, located in the “TurboVNC” Applications folder. You can also open a terminal and execute:

    sudo /opt/TurboVNC/bin/uninstall

### Windows

Use the “Programs and Features” applet in the Control Panel (or the “Add or Remove Programs” applet if you are running Windows XP), or select “Uninstall TurboVNC” in the “TurboVNC” Start Menu group.

# 6 Using TurboVNC

## 6.1 Starting and Connecting to a TurboVNC Session

### Procedure

1. Open a new Command Prompt/terminal window on your client machine.
2. In the new Command Prompt/terminal window, open a Secure Shell (SSH) session into the TurboVNC server machine:
   Linux/Un*x/Mac clients

         ssh {user}@{server}

   Windows clients

         "c:\program files\turbovnc\putty" {user}@{server}

     Replace `{user}` with your username on the TurboVNC server machine and `{server}` with the hostname or IP address of that machine.
3. In the SSH session, start a TurboVNC session:

       /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncserver

4. Make a note of the X display number that the TurboVNC session is occupying, for instance:
   `Desktop 'TurboVNC: my_server:1 (my_user)' started on display my_server:1`
   If this is the first time that a TurboVNC session has ever been run under this user account, and if VNC password authentication is enabled for the session, then TurboVNC will prompt for a VNC password.
5. The SSH session can now be exited, if desired.
6. On the client machine, start the TurboVNC Viewer.
   Linux/Un*x clients
     Open a new terminal/xterm and type

         /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncviewer

   Mac clients
     Open the “TurboVNC Viewer” application, located in the “TurboVNC” Applications folder.
   Windows clients
     Select “TurboVNC Viewer” in the “TurboVNC” Start Menu group.
7. A small dialog box will appear.

   Windows TurboVNC Viewer | Linux/Un*x/Mac (Java) TurboVNC Viewer
   --- | ---

   Enter the X display name (hostname, or IP address, and display number) of the TurboVNC session in the “VNC server” field, then click “Connect”.
8. Another dialog box appears, prompting for the password (if Standard VNC authentication is being used) or for the username and password (if Unix Login authentication is being used.)

   | Windows TurboVNC Viewer | Linux/Un*x/Mac (Java) TurboVNC Viewer
   --- | --- | ---
   Standard VNC Authentication Dialog |  |
   Unix Login Authentication Dialog |  |

   Enter the VNC session password or the Unix username/password and click “OK” (Windows) or press Enter (Linux/Un*x/Mac.)
   A TurboVNC desktop window should appear on your client machine. This window contains a virtual desktop with which you can interact to launch X-Windows applications on the TurboVNC server machine.

## 6.2 Disconnecting and Killing a TurboVNC Session

Closing the TurboVNC Viewer disconnects from the TurboVNC session, but the TurboVNC session will remain running on the TurboVNC server machine (as will any applications that you may have started within the session), and you can reconnect to the session at any time.

To kill a TurboVNC session:

1. Using SSH (`c:\Program Files\TurboVNC\putty.exe` on Windows clients), log into the server machine that is running the TurboVNC session you want to kill.
   … or …
   Using the TurboVNC Viewer, connect to the TurboVNC session that you want to kill, and open a new terminal in that TurboVNC session.
2. Type the following command:

       /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncserver -kill :{n}

   Replace `{n}` with the X display number of the TurboVNC session you want to kill.

To list the X display numbers and process ID’s of all TurboVNC sessions currently running under your user account on a particular server machine, type the following command:

    /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncserver -list

## 6.3 Using TurboVNC in a Web Browser

When a TurboVNC session is created, it automatically launches a miniature web server that serves up the Java TurboVNC Viewer as either an applet or a Java Web Start app. This allows you to easily connect to the TurboVNC session from a machine that does not have the TurboVNC Viewer installed locally. The Java TurboVNC Viewer, when launched in this manner, can use the libjpeg-turbo JNI library to accelerate JPEG decoding, if the library is available on the client machine. If one of the official TurboVNC binary packages is installed on the server, then it will automatically send the appropriate x86 or x86-64 libjpeg-turbo JNI library for Linux, OS X, or Windows clients when launching the TurboVNC Viewer using Java Web Start. If using the Java TurboVNC Viewer as an applet, then you can install one of the official libjpeg-turbo packages on the client machine to accelerate JPEG decoding.

To use the Java TurboVNC Viewer in a web browser, point your web browser to:

`http://``{turbovnc_server}``:{5800+``n``}`

where `{turbovnc_server}` is the hostname or IP address of the TurboVNC server machine, and `n` is the X display number of the TurboVNC session to which you want to connect.

Example: If the TurboVNC session is occupying X display `my_server:1`, then point your web browser to:

`http://my_server:5801`

This will download a JNLP file to your computer, which you can open in Java Web Start. Add `/applet` to the URL to launch the viewer as a Java applet instead (as of this writing, browsers are starting to do away with Java plugins, so running the viewer as an applet is more of a legacy feature.)

You can add viewer parameters to the URL using the following format:

`http://``{turbovnc_server}``:{5800+``n``}?``{param1}``=``{value1}``&``{param2}``=``{value2}`

Examples:

`http://my_server:5801/applet?embed=1&tunnel=1`

will run the viewer as an applet in the browser window and tunnel the VNC connection through SSH.

`http://my_server:5801?tunnel=1&samp=2x&quality=80`

will run the viewer as a JWS app, tunnel the VNC connection through SSH, and enable Medium-Quality JPEG.

NOTE: As of Java 7 Update 51, self-signed JARs are not allowed to run in the Java browser plug-in or JWS by default. This is not an issue if you are using the official TurboVNC binary packages, but if you are building a self-signed version of the Java TurboVNC Viewer for development purposes, then you will need to add `http://{turbovnc_server}:{http_port}` (for example, `http://my_server:5801`) to Java’s Exception Site List, which can be found under the “Security” tab in the Java Control Panel.

NOTE: On some newer OS X systems, downloading a JNLP file may result in an error: “xxxxxxxx.jnlp can’t be opened because it it from an unidentified developer.” To work around this, you can either open the JNLP file directly from your Downloads folder, or you can change the application security settings in the “Security & Privacy” section of System Preferences to allow applications downloaded from anywhere.

## 6.4 Deploying the Java TurboVNC Viewer Using Java Web Start

Accessing the Java TurboVNC Viewer through TurboVNC’s built-in HTTP server, as described above, is a quick and easy way of running the TurboVNC Viewer on machines that don’t already have a VNC viewer installed (for instance, for the purpose of collaborating with colleagues who don’t normally use TurboVNC.)

To set up a large-scale zero-install deployment of the Java TurboVNC Viewer, it is desirable to serve up the JAR files from a dedicated web server. When deployed using JWS, the Java TurboVNC Viewer provides all of the advantages of a standalone native viewer, including native levels of performance on most platforms (see notes regarding performance on Mac platforms.)

For the purposes of this guide, it is assumed that the reader has some knowledge of web server administration.

- Copy the Java TurboVNC Viewer JAR file (`VncViewer.jar`) into a directory on your web server.
- Copy the libjpeg-turbo JNI JAR files into that same directory. You can obtain these from one of the official TurboVNC 2.0 or later binary packages for Linux, or you can download `libjpeg-turbo-{version}-jws.zip` from libjpeg-turbo 1.3.0 or later (available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/libjpeg-turbo/files.) Note that only the JARs included in the official TurboVNC packages are signed using an official code signing certificate.
- For large organizations, it is recommended that you obtain your own code signing certificate from a trusted certificate authority and use `jarsigner` to sign all of the JARs with this certificate. The specifics of this are left as an exercise for the reader.
- Create a file called `TurboVNC.jnlp` in the same directory as `VncViewer.jar` on the web server, and give it the following contents:

      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
      <jnlp codebase="{turbovnc_url}">
        <information>
          <title>TurboVNC Viewer</title>
          <vendor>The VirtualGL Project</vendor>
        </information>

        <resources>
          <j2se version="1.6+" java-vm-args="-server -Dsun.java2d.d3d=false"/>
          <jar href="VncViewer.jar"/>
        </resources>

        <security>
          <all-permissions/>
        </security>

        <resources os="Mac OS X">
          <nativelib href="ljtosx.jar"/>
        </resources>

        <resources os="Windows" arch="x86">
          <nativelib href="ljtwin32.jar"/>
        </resources>

        <resources os="Windows" arch="amd64">
          <nativelib href="ljtwin64.jar"/>
        </resources>

        <resources os="Linux" arch="i386">
          <nativelib href="ljtlinux32.jar"/>
        </resources>

        <resources os="Linux" arch="amd64">
          <nativelib href="ljtlinux64.jar"/>
        </resources>

        <application-desc main-class="com.turbovnc.vncviewer.VncViewer"/>
      </jnlp>

  NOTE: `{turbovnc_url}` should be the absolute URL of the TurboVNC Viewer directory on the web server, e.g. `http://my_server/turbovnc`.

  This is just a minimal example. Refer to the Java Web Start documentation for additional fields that you might want to add.
- You should now be able to access `{turbovnc_url}/TurboVNC.jnlp` in your browser to launch the Java TurboVNC Viewer with full performance.

## 6.5 Securing a TurboVNC Connection

Normally, the connection between the TurboVNC Server and the TurboVNC Viewer is completely unencrypted, but securing that connection can be easily accomplished by using the port forwarding feature of Secure Shell (SSH.) After you have started a TurboVNC session on the TurboVNC server machine, open a new SSH connection into the TurboVNC server machine using the following command line:

Linux/Un*x/Mac clients

      ssh -L {5900+n}:localhost:{5900+n} {user}@{server}

Windows clients

      "c:\program files\turbovnc\putty" -L {5900+n}:localhost:{5900+n} {user}@{server}

Replace `{user}` with your username on the TurboVNC server machine and `{server}` with the hostname or IP address of that machine. Replace `n` with the X display number of the TurboVNC session to which you want to connect.

For instance, if you want to connect to display `:1` on server `my_server` using user account `my_user`, you would type:

Linux/Un*x/Mac clients

      ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 my_user@my_server

Windows clients

      "c:\program files\turbovnc\putty" -L 5901:localhost:5901 my_user@my_server

After the SSH connection has been established, you can then launch the TurboVNC Viewer and point it to `localhost:``{n}` (`localhost:1` in the above example.)

You can force PuTTY to use an IPv6 interface for the local end of the tunnel by replacing `-L` with `-L6` in the above command line.

For LAN connections and other high-speed networks, tunneling the TurboVNC connection through PuTTY will reduce performance by as much as 20%.

### The `-via` and `-tunnel` Command-Line Options

If you are using the Java TurboVNC Viewer (which you are if you are using a Mac, Linux, or Un*x platform), then you can simplify the above by using the `-via` and `-tunnel` command-line options, or the equivalent GUI options (located under the “Security” tab in the Options dialog.) For instance, running

    {vncviewer} -via {user}@{server} localhost:{n}

or

    {vncviewer} -tunnel {user}@{server}

is the equivalent of running

    /usr/bin/ssh -L {fp}:localhost:{5900+n} {user}@{server}
    {vncviewer} localhost::{fp}

where `{fp}` is a free TCP port on the client machine (this is automatically determined by the TurboVNC Viewer.)

In the above examples, `{vncviewer}` is the command used to launch the TurboVNC Viewer– `/opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncviewer` on Mac/Linux/Un*x systems or `c:\Program Files\TurboVNC\vncviewer-java.bat` if running the Java TurboVNC Viewer on Windows systems.

`-tunnel` can be used as a shortcut whenever the SSH and VNC servers are the same machine. `-via` is more flexible, since it allows you to specify the VNC server to which to connect. The VNC server is specified from the point of view of the SSH server, which is why we used `localhost` in the above example.

The command used to establish the SSH tunnel is configurable by way of environment variables. See Section 11.2 for more details.

NOTE: In this release of TurboVNC, the TurboVNC Viewer for Linux/Un*x and Mac platforms is actually the Java TurboVNC Viewer, which is packaged along with the libjpeg-turbo JNI library and necessary glueware to make the viewer behave and perform like a standalone native viewer. Since the Java TurboVNC Viewer contains an embedded SSH client, the `via` and `tunnel` parameters can also be used when the viewer is run as an applet or deployed using Java Web Start.

The Windows TurboVNC Viewer contains experimental support for the `-via` and `-tunnel` command-line options. Currently, the use of these requires Cygwin OpenSSH, since it is the only version of SSH on Windows that supports detaching the SSH process once the tunnel has been established. When using these options, a console window pops up and remains for the duration of the VNC connection.

### Forcing Secure Connections

Passing an argument of `-localhost` to `vncserver` will force the TurboVNC Server session to accept inbound connections only from the server machine. This effectively forces SSH tunneling to be used for remote connections. If the `no-remote-connections` directive is set in the TurboVNC security configuration file, then that has the effect of enabling the `-localhost` option for all new TurboVNC sessions that are started on the machine.

Passing an argument of `-noreverse` to `vncserver` will disable the ability to make outbound (reverse) connections from the TurboVNC Server session. If the `no-reverse-connections` directive is set in the TurboVNC security configuration file, then that has the effect of enabling the `-noreverse` option for all new TurboVNC sessions that are started on the machine.

## 6.6 Further Reading

For more detailed instructions on the usage of TurboVNC:

TurboVNC Server
  Refer to the TurboVNC man pages:

      man -M /opt/TurboVNC/man vncserver
      man -M /opt/TurboVNC/man Xvnc
      man -M /opt/TurboVNC/man vncconnect
      man -M /opt/TurboVNC/man vncpasswd

Windows TurboVNC Viewer
  Use the embedded help feature (the question mark button in the upper right of the TurboVNC Viewer dialogs.) You can also run `vncviewer.exe /?` from a command prompt to get a full list of supported command-line options and their descriptions.
Linux/Un*x/Mac (Java) TurboVNC Viewer
  Run

      /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncviewer -?

  to display a full list of supported command-line options/parameters and their descriptions.
Java TurboVNC Viewer on Windows
  Run

      c:\Program Files\TurboVNC\vncviewer-java.bat -?

  to display a full list of supported command-line options/parameters and their descriptions.

# 7 Performance and Image Quality

The level of image compression in TurboVNC can be adjusted to balance the (sometimes conflicting) goals of high image quality and high performance. There are four options that control the manner in which TurboVNC compresses images:

Allow JPEG compression
  If this option is enabled, then TurboVNC will use JPEG compression for subrectangles that have a high number of unique colors, and it will use indexed color subencoding for subrectangles that have a low number of unique colors. If this option is disabled, then TurboVNC will select between indexed color or raw subencoding, depending on the size of the subrectangle and its color count.
JPEG image quality
  Lower quality levels produce grainier JPEG images with more noticeable compression artifacts, but lower quality levels also use less network bandwidth and CPU time.
JPEG chrominance subsampling
  When compressing an image using JPEG, the RGB pixels are first converted to the YCbCr colorspace, a colorspace in which each pixel is represented as a brightness (Y, or “luminance”) value and a pair of color (Cb & Cr, or “chrominance”) values. After this colorspace conversion, chrominance subsampling can be used to discard some of the chrominance components in order to save bandwidth. This works because the human eye is more sensitive to changes in brightness than to changes in color. 1X subsampling (the default in TurboVNC) retains the chrominance components for all pixels, and thus it provides the best image quality but also uses the most network bandwidth and CPU time. 2X subsampling retains the chrominance components for every other pixel, and 4X subsampling retains the chrominance components for every fourth pixel (this is typically implemented as 2X subsampling in both X and Y directions.) Grayscale throws out all of the chrominance components, leaving only luminance. 2X and 4X subsampling will typically produce noticeable blurring of lines and other sharp features, but with photographic or other “smooth” image content, it may be difficult to detect any difference between 1X, 2X, and 4X.
Compression level
  In TurboVNC, the compression level specifies:
  1. the level of zlib compression that will be used with indexed color, mono, and raw subrectangles
  2. the “palette threshold” (the minimum number of colors that a subrectangle must have before it is encoded as JPEG or raw instead of indexed color)
  3. whether or not interframe comparison should be used
  See Section 7.2 below for more details.

These parameters can be adjusted by accessing the TurboVNC Viewer Options dialog box (click on the “Options” button in the “TurboVNC Connection” dialog box or, after connecting to the server, click on the Connection Options button in the toolbar.)

The TurboVNC Viewer provides five preset “encoding methods”, corresponding to the most useful combinations of the image compression options described above:

Table 7.1: TurboVNC Encoding Methods
Encoding method | Allow JPEG | JPEG image quality | JPEG chrominance subsampling | Compression level | Notes
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
“Tight + Perceptually Lossless JPEG” | Yes | 95 | 1x | 1 | This encoding method should be perceptually lossless (that is, any image compression artifacts it produces should be imperceptible to human vision) under most viewing conditions. This encoding method requires a great deal of network bandwidth, however, and is generally not recommended except on 50 Megabit/second and faster networks.
“Tight + Medium-Quality JPEG” | Yes | 80 | 2x | 6 | For subrectangles that have a high number of unique colors, this encoding method produces some minor, but generally not very noticeable, image compression artifacts. All else being equal, this encoding method typically uses about twice the network bandwidth of the “Tight + Low-Quality JPEG” encoding method and about half the bandwidth of the “Tight + Perceptually Lossless JPEG” encoding method, making it appropriate for medium-speed networks such as 10 Megabit Ethernet. Interframe comparison is enabled with this encoding method (Compression Level 6 = Compression Level 1 + interframe comparison.)
“Tight + Low-Quality JPEG” | Yes | 30 | 4x | 7 | For subrectangles that have a high number of unique colors, this encoding method produces very noticeable image compression artifacts. However, it performs optimally on low-bandwidth connections. If image quality is more critical than performance, then use one of the other encoding methods or take advantage of the Lossless Refresh feature. In addition to reducing the JPEG quality to a “minimum usable” level, this encoding method also enables interframe comparison and Compression Level 2 (CL 7 = CL 2 + interframe comparison.) Compression Level 2 can reduce bandwidth for low-color application workloads that are not good candidates for JPEG compression.
“Lossless Tight” | No | N/A | N/A | 0 | This encoding method uses indexed color subencoding for subrectangles that have a low number of unique colors, but it otherwise does not perform any image compression at all. Lossless Tight is thus suitable only for gigabit and faster networks. This encoding method uses significantly less CPU time than any of the JPEG-based encoding methods. Lossless Tight requires an RFB protocol extension that is, as of this writing, only supported by the TurboVNC Viewer.
“Lossless Tight + Zlib” | No | N/A | N/A | 6 | This encoding method uses indexed color subencoding for subrectangles that have a low number of unique colors and raw subencoding for subrectangles that have a high number of unique colors. It compresses all subrectangles using zlib with zlib compression level 1. For certain types of low-color workloads (CAD applications, in particular), this encoding method may use less network bandwidth than the “Tight + Perceptually Lossless JPEG” encoding method, but it also uses significantly more CPU time than any of the JPEG-based encoding methods. Interframe comparison is enabled with this encoding method (Compression Level 6 = Compression Level 1 + interframe comparison.)

The encoding method can be set in the TurboVNC Viewer Options dialog box (click on the “Options” button in the “TurboVNC Connection” dialog box or, after connecting to the server, click on the Connection Options button in the toolbar.)

## 7.1 Interframe Comparison

Certain ill-behaved applications can sometimes draw the same thing over and over again, and this can cause redundant framebuffer updates to be sent to the VNC viewer. The TurboVNC Server can guard against this by maintaining a copy of the remote framebuffer for each connected viewer, comparing each new framebuffer update rectangle against the pixels in the framebuffer copy, and discarding any redundant portions of the rectangle before they are sent to the viewer.

Interframe comparison has some tradeoffs associated with it. Perhaps the most important of these is that it increases the memory usage of the TurboVNC Server by a factor of N, where N is the number of connected viewers. This can prove to be quite significant if the remote desktop size is relatively large.

2D applications are most often the ones that generate duplicate framebuffer updates, so using interframe comparison with such applications can significantly reduce the network usage and the server CPU usage (since fewer rectangles are actually being encoded.) However, with 3D applications, the benefits of interframe comparison are less clear, since it is less common for those applications to generate duplicate framebuffer updates. Interframe comparison may benefit certain classes of 3D applications, such as design applications that render a model against a static background– particularly when the model is not zoomed in enough to fill the entire window. In real-world tests, however, interframe comparison rarely reduces the network usage for 3D applications by more than 5-10%. Furthermore, with games and other immersive applications that modify most of the pixels on the screen each time a frame is rendered, interframe comparison can actually increase both CPU usage and network usage. Furthermore, the effects of duplicate framebuffer updates are not typically noticeable on high-speed networks, but an increase in server CPU usage might be.

For these reasons, interframe comparison is not enabled by default and should not generally be enabled except on low-bandwidth networks and with applications for which it can be shown to be beneficial. Interframe comparison can be enabled by either passing an argument of `-interframe` to `vncserver` when starting a TurboVNC Server session or by requesting a compression level of 5 or higher from the viewer (see below.)

## 7.2 Advanced Compression Options

One of the underlying principles of TurboVNC’s design is to expose only the options that have proven to be useful (that is, the options that have proven to have good performance tradeoffs.) Thus, the TurboVNC Viewer GUI will normally only allow you to select Compression Levels 1-2 if JPEG subencoding is enabled (6-7 if interframe comparison is also enabled) or Compression Levels 0-1 if JPEG subencoding is disabled (5-6 if interframe comparison is enabled.) Other compression levels can, however, be specified on the command line (or as a parameter, if using the Java TurboVNC Viewer), and doing so will enable a compatibility mode in the TurboVNC Viewer GUI that allows any compression level from 0 to 9 to be requested.

When connecting to a TurboVNC server, requesting a particular compression level has the following effect:

Table 7.2: Compression Levels Supported by the TurboVNC Server (JPEG Enabled)
Compression level | Zlib compression level (non-JPEG subrectangles) | Palette threshold | Interframe comparison | Notes
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
0 | 1 | 24 | No | Same as Compression Level 1. Bypassing zlib when JPEG is enabled would only reduce the CPU usage for non-JPEG subrectangles, which is of limited usefulness. Further, bypassing zlib requires an RFB protocol extension that is not supported by non-TurboVNC viewers. It is presumed that, if one wants to reduce the CPU usage, then one wants to do so for all subrectangles, so CL 0 without JPEG (AKA “Lossless Tight”) should be used.
1 | 1 | 24 | No | See the description of the “Tight + JPEG” encoding methods above.
2 | 3 | 96 | No | A higher palette threshold causes indexed color subencoding to be used more often than with CL 1, and indexed color subrectangles are compressed using a higher zlib compression level. This can provide typically 20-40% better compression than CL 1 (with a commensurate increase in CPU usage) for workloads that have a low number of unique colors. However, Compression Level 2 can increase the CPU usage for some high-color workloads without providing significantly better compression.
3-4 | 3 | 96 | No | Same as Compression Level 2 (reserved for future expansion)
5-6 | 1 | 24 | Yes | Same as Compression Level 1, but with interframe comparison enabled
7-8 | 3 | 96 | Yes | Same as Compression Level 2, but with interframe comparison enabled
9 | 7 | 256 | Yes | This mode is included only for backward compatibility with TightVNC. It provides approximately the same level of compression for 2D applications as Compression Level 9 in TightVNC 1.3.x, while using much less CPU time. It also provides much better compression than TightVNC for 3D and video applications. However, relative to Compression Level 2, this mode uses approximately twice as much CPU time and only achieves about 10-20% better average compression for 2D apps (and has no noticeable benefit for 3D and video apps.) Thus, its usefulness is generally very limited.

Table 7.3: Compression Levels Supported by the TurboVNC Server (JPEG Disabled)
Compression Level | Zlib compression level (indexed color subrectangles) | Zlib compression level (raw subrectangles) | Palette threshold | Interframe comparison | Notes
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
0 | None | None | Subrectangle size / 4 | No | See the description of the “Lossless Tight” encoding method above.
1 | 1 | 1 | Subrectangle size / 96 | No | See the description of the “Lossless Tight + Zlib” encoding method above.
2-4 | 1 | 1 | Subrectangle size / 96 | No | Same as Compression Level 1 (reserved for future expansion)
5 | None | None | Subrectangle size / 4 | Yes | Same as Compression Level 0, but with interframe comparison enabled
6-8 | 1 | 1 | Subrectangle size / 96 | Yes | Same as Compression Level 1, but with interframe comparison enabled
9 | 7 | 5 | Subrectangle size / 96 | Yes | This mode is included only for backward compatibility with TightVNC. It provides approximately the same level of compression for 2D applications as Compression Level 9 in TightVNC 1.3.x, while using much less CPU time. It also provides much better compression than TightVNC for 3D and video applications. However, relative to Compression Level 1, this mode uses approximately twice as much CPU time and only achieves about 10% better average compression for 2D apps (and has no noticeable benefit for 3D and video apps.) Thus, its usefulness is generally very limited.

## 7.3 Lossless Refresh

Since both of TurboVNC’s mathematically lossless encoding methods have performance drawbacks, another option for image-quality-critical applications is the “Lossless Refresh” feature. When a lossless refresh is requested by a TurboVNC viewer, the server will send a mathematically lossless image of the current TurboVNC desktop to the requesting viewer. So, for instance, a user can rotate/pan/zoom an object in their 3D application using a very low-quality JPEG setting, then when that user is ready to interpret or analyze the object, they can request a lossless refresh of TurboVNC’s virtual screen.

To perform a lossless refresh, press CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-L or click on the Lossless Refresh toolbar icon.

## 7.4 Automatic Lossless Refresh

Passing an argument of `-alr` `{timeout}` to `vncserver` will enable the automatic lossless refresh (ALR) feature for the TurboVNC session. ALR will monitor all of the VNC viewer connections, and if more than `{timeout}` seconds have elapsed since the last framebuffer update was sent to a given viewer, then the TurboVNC Server will send to that viewer a mathematically lossless copy of any “ALR-eligible” screen regions that have been affected by lossy compression. You can also pass arguments of `-alrqual` and `-alrsamp` to `vncserver` to specify that automatic lossless refreshes should be sent using JPEG instead (see the `Xvnc` man page for details.)

The ALR feature is designed mainly for use with interactive visualization applications. The idea is that, on a low-bandwidth connection, low-quality JPEG can be used while the 3D scene is rotated/panned/zoomed, but when the motion stops, a fully lossless copy of the 3D image is sent and can be studied in detail.

The default is for any regions drawn with `X[Shm]PutImage()` to be ALR-eligible, as well as any regions drawn with CopyRect, if the source of the CopyRect operation was affected by lossy compression (CopyRect is an RFB encoding that allows the server to request that the viewer move a rectangle of pixels from one location to another.) When used with VirtualGL, this means that ALRs will mainly be sent for just the 3D screen regions. This should be fine for most 3D applications, since the 3D regions are the ones that are quality-critical. The default ALR behavior also prevents what might best be called the “blinking cursor dilemma.” Certain ill-behaved window managers update a small region of the taskbar continuously, even though none of the pixels in that region have changed. Also, certain programs have a blinking cursor that may update more frequently than the ALR timeout. Since an ALR is triggered based on a period of inactivity relative to the last framebuffer update, these continuous updates prevent an ALR from ever being sent. Fortunately, these ill-behaved window managers and blinking cursors do not typically use `X[Shm]PutImage()` to perform their updates, so the problem is effectively worked around by limiting the ALR-eligible regions to just the subset of regions that were drawn with `X[Shm]PutImage()` and CopyRect.

You can override the default ALR behavior, thus making all screen regions eligible for ALR, by setting the `TVNC_ALRALL` environment variable to `1` on the TurboVNC server machine prior to starting a TurboVNC session. You can also set `TVNC_ALRCOPYRECT` to `0` to make CopyRect regions ALR-ineligible, which approximates the behavior of TurboVNC 1.2.1 and prior.

## 7.5 Multithreading

The TurboVNC Server can use multiple threads to perform image encoding and compression, thus allowing it to take advantage of multi-core or multi-processor systems. The server splits the screen vertically into N tiles, where N is the number of threads, and assigns each tile to a separate thread. The scalability of this algorithm is nearly linear when used with demanding 3D or video applications that fill most of the screen. However, whether or not multithreading improves the overall performance of TurboVNC depends largely on the performance of the viewer and the network. If either the viewer or the network is the primary performance bottleneck, then multithreading the server will not help. It will almost certainly have no effect on networks slower than 100 Megabit Ethernet or when using the Java TurboVNC Viewer as an applet.

To enable server-side multithreading, set the `TVNC_MT` environment variable to `1` on the server prior to starting `vncserver`. The default behavior is to use as many threads as there are cores on the server machine, but you can set the `TVNC_NTHREADS` environment variable to override this.

## 7.6 Maximizing the Performance of the Java TurboVNC Viewer

### Accelerated JPEG Decoding

The Java TurboVNC Viewer can be used as a standalone app, in which case it provides most of the same features as the native TurboVNC viewer. It can also load libjpeg-turbo through JNI to accelerate JPEG decoding, which gives the Java viewer similar performance to the native viewer in most cases. The TurboVNC Viewer on Mac and Linux/Un*x platforms is simply the Java TurboVNC Viewer packaged in such a way that it behaves like a native viewer. On Windows, the Java TurboVNC Viewer is packaged similarly, but it is included alongside the native TurboVNC Viewer, giving users a choice between the two. The Java TurboVNC Viewer packaging includes the libjpeg-turbo JNI library, which is automatically loaded when you launch the TurboVNC Viewer app on Mac, run the `vncviewer` script on Linux/Un*x, run the `vncviewer-java.bat` script on Windows, or launch “Java TurboVNC Viewer” from the Windows Start Menu. Thus, if you are running the Java TurboVNC Viewer in one of those ways, then no further action is needed to accelerate it.

If you suspect for whatever reason that JPEG decoding is not being accelerated, then the easiest way to check is to open the “Connection Info” dialog (after the connection to the server has been established) and verify that the “JPEG decompression” field says “Turbo”. If you are launching the Java TurboVNC Viewer from the command line, then it will also print a warning if it is unable to load libjpeg-turbo.

### Windows Blitting Performance

The default in Java 2D on Windows platforms is to use Direct3D for blitting, but in the case of TurboVNC, using GDI blitting is almost always much faster. If you are using Java 7 or later, or if you are running the Java TurboVNC Viewer using the `vncviewer-java.bat` script or launching it using the Windows Start Menu shortcut, then Direct3D blitting will be disabled by default, and no further action is necessary. Otherwise, you should consider setting the `sun.java2d.d3d` system property to `false` (for instance, by passing `-Dsun.java2d.d3d=false` as an argument to `java`.) You can use the ImageDrawTest benchmark to verify whether Direct3D blitting is enabled or disabled. To do this, execute the following command:

    java -Dsun.java2d.trace=count -cp "c:\Program Files\TurboVNC\Java\VncViewer.jar" com.turbovnc.vncviewer.ImageDrawTest

Let the benchmark run for 15 or 20 seconds, then abort it with CTRL-C. Looking at the Java 2D trace output will reveal which underlying API (such as Windows GDI, OpenGL, Direct3D, etc.) is being used to draw the images.

### Mac Blitting Performance

The Oracle Java plugin (Java 7 or later) is used on OS X 10.7 and later when launching the Java TurboVNC Viewer as an applet or using Java Web Start. When using TurboVNC as a standalone application, there are two packages provided: one that uses the afore-mentioned Oracle Java plugin and one that uses Apple’s distribution of Java (Java for OS X.) The tradeoffs between the two Java flavors are as follows:

Java for OS X:

- Pre-installed on OS X 10.6 and earlier (can be installed on later OS X releases by downloading the Java for OS X package from Apple Support)
- Includes a Quartz-accelerated Java 2D blitter that provides optimal performance for TurboVNC on older Macs (those containing nVidia and Intel HD Graphics GPUs, specifically)

Oracle Java 7 and later:

- Requires OS X 10.7 or later
- Uses OpenGL for Java 2D blitting, which provides optimal performance for TurboVNC on newer Macs (those containing Intel Iris GPUs, specifically– Java for OS X does not appear to include Java 2D hardware acceleration for those GPUs)

If you are unsure which package to use, then you can compare the performance of both of them using the ImageDrawTest benchmark:

    java -cp /Applications/TurboVNC/TurboVNC\ Viewer.app/Contents/Resources/Java/VncViewer.jar com.turbovnc.vncviewer.ImageDrawTest

NOTE: if you intend to use the desktop scaling feature in the Java TurboVNC Viewer along with the Oracle Java plugin, then upgrade the plugin to Java 8 Update 40 or later. Java 8 Update 40 includes a fix for a severe performance issue in the OpenGL Java 2D blitter that affected scaled blitting.

### Using the Server VM

Passing an argument of `-server` to `java` when launching the Java TurboVNC Viewer is recommended. This enables the adaptive compiler, which performs aggressive code optimizations and actually learns how to better optimize a piece of code the more times it encounters it. Such optimizations greatly improve the decoding performance for non-JPEG subrectangles. If you are launching the Java TurboVNC Viewer using the Mac app, the `vncviewer` or`vncviewer-java.bat` scripts, or the Windows Start Menu shortcut, then the Server VM is automatically enabled.

# 8 TurboVNC Authentication Extensions

The TurboVNC Server supports four “authentication methods”, which are techniques that the VNC server uses to validate authentication credentials sent from a VNC viewer. If the credentials sent from a particular VNC viewer are not valid, then that viewer is not allowed to connect.

No Authentication
  The VNC server does not authenticate the VNC viewer at all.
VNC Password Authentication
  A session password sent from the VNC viewer is validated against a password file, which is typically located under the user’s home directory on the server machine. The VNC password is separate from any other login credentials and thus represents less of a security threat if compromised (that is, assuming the VNC password and the user’s account password are not the same.)
One-Time Password (OTP) Authentication
  Using the `vncpasswd` program, a unique password is generated “on the fly” for the VNC server session, and the password is printed on the command line (see the man page for `vncpasswd` for more details.) The user enters this password in the VNC viewer, and the VNC viewer sends the password to the VNC server as if it were a VNC password. However, once the OTP has been used to authenticate a viewer, the OTP is forgotten and cannot be reused. OTP authentication can be used, for instance, to launch or connect to TurboVNC sessions from an automated web portal or from a job scheduler. OTP authentication is also useful for allowing temporary access to a TurboVNC session for collaboration purposes.
PAM User/Password Authentication
  The VNC server uses Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) to validate a username and password received from a VNC viewer. The password received from the VNC viewer need not necessarily be validated against the user’s account password. Generally, the TurboVNC Server can validate the username and password using any authentication credentials that can be accessed through PAM. Since the user/password authentication scheme supported by TurboVNC (see below) transmits the password from the VNC viewer to the VNC server as plain text, it is strongly recommended that the PAM User/Password authentication method be used only if the server is restricted to allow only loopback (SSH) connections and to disallow reverse connections (see Section 6.5.)

The TurboVNC Viewer supports three “authentication schemes”, which are protocols used to send authentication credentials from a VNC viewer to a VNC server for validation.

None
  No authentication credentials are sent to the server.
Standard VNC Authentication
  A password is sent to the server using a DES-encrypted challenge/response scheme. The password can be up to 8 characters long, so the DES key length is 56 bits. This is not a particularly strong form of encryption by today’s standards (56-bit DES was broken by brute force attack in the late 90’s.)
Unix Login Authentication
  Both the username and password are sent to the VNC server as plain text. Thus, it is strongly recommended that this authentication scheme be used only with VNC connections that are encrypted using SSH (see Section 6.5.)

## 8.1 Enabling Authentication Methods

The default behavior of the TurboVNC Server is for all authentication methods except “None” to be enabled and for VNC Password and OTP authentication to be preferred over PAM User/Password authentication. However, the system administrator can disable one or more of the authentication methods or set the preferred order of the authentication methods by editing the server’s security configuration file. See the `Xvnc` man page for more details.

If the VNC server allows multiple authentication methods that support multiple authentication schemes, then the VNC viewer’s default authentication scheme will be determined by the server’s preferred authentication method. In this case, the user can override the default by passing command-line arguments to `vncviewer`. If the VNC server prefers an authentication method that supports Standard VNC authentication, then the user can force the use of Unix Login authentication by passing an argument of `-user` `{user_name}` to `vncviewer` when connecting to the TurboVNC session. Similarly, if the VNC server prefers an authentication method that supports Unix Login authentication, then the user can force the use of Standard VNC authentication by passing an argument of `-nounixlogin` to `vncviewer`. Both of these command-line options work with all versions of the TurboVNC Viewer. When using the Java TurboVNC Viewer, you can also accomplish the same thing by unchecking “Unix Login” or “Standard VNC” in the “Security” tab of the Options dialog or by limiting the available security types using the `SecurityTypes`, `User`, or `NoUnixLogin` arguments/parameters.

If the system administrator has not restricted any of the authentication methods on a system-wide basis, then the user can choose to disable some or all of them for a single TurboVNC session by passing command-line arguments to `vncserver`. See the `vncserver` man page for more details.

## 8.2 Further Reading

For more detailed information about the TurboVNC authentication extensions, refer to the TurboVNC man pages:

    man -M /opt/TurboVNC/man vncserver
    man -M /opt/TurboVNC/man Xvnc
    man -M /opt/TurboVNC/man vncpasswd

# 9 Using TurboVNC with VirtualGL

Referring to the VirtualGL User’s Guide, VirtualGL’s X11 Transport draws 3D images onto an X display using standard X11 drawing commands. Since this results in the images being sent uncompressed to the X server, the X11 Transport is designed to be used with an “X Proxy.” An X proxy acts as a virtual X server, receiving X11 commands from the application (and from VirtualGL), rendering the X11 commands into images, compressing the resulting images, and sending the compressed images over the network to a client or clients.

Since VirtualGL is sending rendered 3D images to the X proxy at a very fast rate, the proxy must be able to compress the images very quickly in order to keep up. Unfortunately, however, most X proxies can’t. They simply aren’t designed to compress, with any degree of performance, the large and complex images generated by 3D applications.

Enter TurboVNC. Although TurboVNC can be used with all types of applications, it was initially designed as a fast X proxy for VirtualGL. TurboVNC provides an alternate means of delivering rendered 3D images from VirtualGL to a client machine without using VirtualGL’s embedded VGL Transport.

### Advantages of TurboVNC (when compared to the VGL Transport)

- When using the VGL Transport, non-3D portions of the application’s GUI are sent over the network using remote X11, which will create performance problems on high-latency networks (such as broadband or long-haul fibre.) Non-3D portions of the application’s GUI will load and render much faster (perhaps even orders of magnitude faster) with TurboVNC than with the VGL Transport on such connections.
- For 3D applications whose rendered images do not contain very many unique colors (for instance, CAD applications in wireframe mode), the hybrid encoding methods used by TurboVNC will generally use less network bandwidth than the pure JPEG encoding method used by the VGL Transport.
- TurboVNC provides two lossless compression modes, one of which is designed to reduce server CPU usage on gigabit networks and the other of which is designed to provide reasonable performance on wide-area networks (at the expense of higher server CPU usage.) The VGL Transport’s only lossless option is uncompressed RGB.
- TurboVNC includes a lossless refresh feature that will, on demand, send a mathematically lossless image of the current VNC desktop to the client. A user connecting over a low-bandwidth connection can use low-quality JPEG to achieve the best performance when manipulating the 3D model, then they can request a lossless refresh when they are ready to study the model in detail.
- The TurboVNC Server can be configured to send a mathematically lossless copy of certain regions of the screen during periods of inactivity (Automatic Lossless Refresh.)
- TurboVNC provides rudimentary collaboration capabilities. Multiple clients can simultaneously view the same TurboVNC session and pass around control of the keyboard and mouse.
- The TurboVNC Viewer is stateless. If the network hiccups or the viewer is otherwise disconnected, the session continues to run on the server and can be rejoined from any machine on the network.
- No X server is required on the client machine. This reduces the deployment complexity for Windows clients.
- Zero-install high-performance Java viewer can be launched from any machine that has Java and a web browser installed.
- Any mobile device can be used as a TurboVNC client (with reduced performance.)

### Disadvantages of TurboVNC (when compared to the VGL transport)

- No seamless windows. All application windows are constrained to a “virtual desktop”, which displays in a single window on the client machine.
- TurboVNC will generally require about 20% more server CPU cycles to maintain the same frame rate as the VGL Transport, both because it has to compress more pixels in each frame (an entire desktop rather than a single window) and because it has to perform 2D (X11) rendering as well as 3D rendering.
- TurboVNC does not support quad-buffered stereo or transparent overlays.

## 9.1 Using TurboVNC and VirtualGL on the Same Server

The most common (and optimal) way to use TurboVNC is to set it up on the same server that is running VirtualGL. This allows VirtualGL to send its rendered 3D images to TurboVNC through shared memory rather than sending them over a network.

The following procedure describes how to launch a 3D application using this configuration.

### Procedure

1. Follow the procedure described in Chapter 6 for starting a TurboVNC session and connecting to it.
2. Open a new terminal inside the TurboVNC desktop.
3. In the terminal, start a 3D application using VirtualGL:

       /opt/VirtualGL/bin/vglrun [vglrun options] {application_executable_or_script} {arguments}

   The TurboVNC startup script sets the `VGL_COMPRESS` environment variable to `0`, which will automatically enable the X11 Transport within VirtualGL.

## 9.2 Using TurboVNC When VirtualGL Is Running on a Different Machine

If TurboVNC and VirtualGL are running on different servers, then it is desirable to use the VGL Transport to send images from the VirtualGL server to the TurboVNC server. It is also desirable to disable image compression in the VGL Transport. Otherwise, the images would have to be compressed by the VirtualGL server, decompressed by the VirtualGL Client, then recompressed by the TurboVNC Server, which is a waste of CPU resources. However, sending images uncompressed over a network requires a fast network (generally, Gigabit Ethernet or faster), so there needs to be a fast link between the VirtualGL server and the TurboVNC server for this procedure to perform well.

### Procedure

1. Follow the procedure described in Chapter 6 for starting a TurboVNC session and connecting to it.
2. Open a new terminal inside the TurboVNC desktop.
3. In the same terminal window, open a Secure Shell (SSH) session into the VirtualGL server:

       /opt/VirtualGL/bin/vglconnect {user}@{server}

   Replace `{user}` with your username on the VirtualGL server and `{server}` with the hostname or IP address of that server. Refer to the VirtualGL User’s Guide for additional `vglconnect` options.
4. In the SSH session, set the `VGL_COMPRESS` environment variable to `rgb`

   Passing an argument of `-c rgb` to `vglrun` achieves the same effect.

5. In the SSH session, start a 3D application using VirtualGL:

       /opt/VirtualGL/bin/vglrun [vglrun options] {application_executable_or_script} {arguments}

# 10 Compatibility Guide

In order to realize the full performance benefits of TurboVNC, it is necessary to use a TurboVNC server and a TurboVNC viewer in concert. However, TurboVNC is fully compatible with TigerVNC, TightVNC, RealVNC, and other VNC flavors. You can use the TurboVNC Viewer to connect to a non-TurboVNC server (or vice versa), although this will generally result in some decrease in performance.

The following sections list additional things to bear in mind when mixing TurboVNC with other VNC flavors.

## 10.1 TightVNC or TigerVNC Servers

- TightVNC and TigerVNC specify the JPEG quality level on a scale from 0 to 9. This translates to actual JPEG quality as follows:
  TightVNC JPEG Quality Levels

    JPEG quality level | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
    --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
    Actual JPEG quality | 5 | 10 | 15 | 25 | 37 | 50 | 60 | 70 | 75 | 80
    Actual chrominance subsampling | 2X | 2X | 2X | 2X | 2X | 2X | 2X | 2X | 2X | 2X

  TigerVNC JPEG Quality Levels

    JPEG quality level | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
    --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
    Actual JPEG quality | 15 | 29 | 41 | 42 | 62 | 77 | 79 | 86 | 92 | 100
    Actual chrominance subsampling | 4X | 4X | 4X | 2X | 2X | 2X | 1X | 1X | 1X | 1X
    Average compression ratio * | 100 | 80 | 70 | 60 | 50 | 40 | 30 | 25 | 20 | 10

    * Experimentally determined by compressing every 10th frame in the SPECviewperf 9 benchmark suite

  TurboVNC, on the other hand, includes extensions to Tight encoding that allow the JPEG quality to be specified on the standard 1-100 scale and allow the JPEG chrominance subsampling to be specified seperately. TigerVNC 1.2 (and later) includes the same extensions on the server side, so the TigerVNC 1.2+ Server will behave like the TurboVNC Server when a TurboVNC viewer is connected to it.
  When a TurboVNC viewer is connected to a TightVNC or TigerVNC 1.0/1.1 server, setting the JPEG quality to N in the TurboVNC Viewer sets the JPEG quality level to N/10 on the TightVNC or TigerVNC server. For instance, if you set the JPEG quality to 95 in the TurboVNC Viewer, this would translate to a JPEG quality level of 9, which would set the actual JPEG quality/subsampling to 80/2X if connected to a TightVNC server or 100/1X if connected to a TigerVNC 1.0/1.1 server.
- Changing the JPEG chrominance subsampling option in the TurboVNC Viewer has no effect when connected to a TightVNC or TigerVNC 1.0/1.1 server.
- Normally, the TurboVNC Viewer GUI only allows you to select the compression levels that are useful for TurboVNC servers, but you can specify additional compression levels on the TurboVNC Viewer command line. You can also pass an argument of `-compatiblegui` to the viewer to expose all 10 compression levels in the GUI, which is useful when connecting to non-TurboVNC servers. It should be noted, however, that our experiments have shown that compression levels higher than 5 are generally not useful in the TightVNC or TigerVNC Servers. They increase CPU usage exponentially without providing any significant savings in bandwidth relative to Compression Level 5.
- TurboVNC supports an extension to Tight encoding that allows the server to tell the viewer not to use zlib to decompress a particular subrectangle. Zlib introduces a tremendous amount of performance overhead, even when zlib compression level 0 (no compression) is used. Thus, when a TurboVNC viewer requests Compression Level 0 from the TurboVNC Server, the TurboVNC Server bypasses zlib altogether. TightVNC and TigerVNC servers do not support this extension, and thus they will still use zlib to “compress” the framebuffer updates even if you request Compression Level 0 using the TurboVNC Viewer.
- When properly configured, version 1.2 and later (except for versions 1.4.0 - 1.4.2, which contained a performance regression) of the TigerVNC Server can be made to perform similarly to a single-threaded instance of the TurboVNC Server. However, all other versions of TigerVNC and TightVNC will use much more CPU time across the board than the TurboVNC Server, all else being equal. With JPEG enabled, Compression Levels 1 and 2 in TigerVNC are roughly equivalent to the same compression levels in TurboVNC, except that TigerVNC enables interframe comparison automatically with Compression Level 2 and above.

## 10.2 TightVNC or TigerVNC Viewers

- The TurboVNC Server will attempt to emulate the behavior of a TigerVNC server and will translate JPEG quality levels into actual JPEG quality and subsampling, as specified in Section 10.1.
- When either a TightVNC or TigerVNC viewer is connected to a TurboVNC server and JPEG subencoding is disabled, setting the compression level to 0 in the viewer will cause the connection to abort with a “bad subencoding value” error. This is because the TurboVNC Server is attempting to send the framebuffer updates with no zlib compression, and the TightVNC and TigerVNC viewers don’t support this.
- Refer to Section 7.2 for a description of how the TurboVNC Server responds to requests for Compression Levels 0-9.

## 10.3 RealVNC

The TurboVNC Viewer supports the Hextile and Raw encoding types, which are compatible with RealVNC. The Java TurboVNC Viewer additionally supports ZRLE and RRE. None of these encoding types can be selected from the TurboVNC Viewer GUI, but Hextile or ZRLE will be selected automatically when connecting to a RealVNC server. Non-Tight encoding types, such as Hextile and Raw, can also be manually selected from the TurboVNC Viewer command line. In addition to Hextile, Raw, ZRLE, and RRE, the TurboVNC Server also supports the CoRRE and Zlib legacy encoding types, for compatibility with older VNC viewers.

All of the non-Tight encoding types have performance drawbacks. Raw encoding requires gigabit in order to achieve decent performance, and it can easily take up an entire gigabit connection’s worth of bandwidth (it also doesn’t perform particularly well with the Java TurboVNC Viewer, because of the need to convert the pixels from bytes to ints in Java.) Hextile uses very small tiles, which causes it to incur a large amount of computational overhead. It compresses too poorly to perform well on slow links but uses too much CPU time to perform well on fast links. ZRLE improves upon this, but it is still too computationally intense for fast networks. The `vncviewer` man page in the TurboVNC Linux packages has some additional information about how Hextile, RRE, and ZRLE work.

# 11 Advanced Configuration

## 11.1 Server Settings

Environment Variable | `TVNC_ALRALL =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/Enable automatic lossless refresh for regions that were drawn using X11 functions other than `X[Shm]PutImage()`
Default Value | Disabled

Description
  See Section 7.4

Environment Variable | `TVNC_ALRCOPYRECT =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/Enable automatic lossless refresh for regions that were drawn using CopyRect
Default Value | Enabled

Description
  See Section 7.4

Environment Variable | `TVNC_COMBINERECT =` `{c}`
Summary | Combine framebuffer updates with more than `{c}` rectangles into a single rectangle spanning the bounding box of all of the constituent rectangles
Default Value | 100

Description
  Applications can sometimes draw many thousands of points or tiny lines using individual X11 calls, and this can cause the VNC server to send many thousands of tiny rectangles to the VNC viewer. The overhead associated with this can bog down the viewer, and in extreme cases, the number of rectangles may even exceed the maximum number that is allowed in a single framebuffer update (65534.) Thus, if a framebuffer update contains more than `{c}` rectangles, TurboVNC will coalesce it into a single rectangle that covers all of the rectangles in the update. For applications that generate many tiny rectangles, increasing `TVNC_COMBINERECT` may significantly increase the number of pixels sent to the viewer, which will increase network usage. However, for those same applications, lowering `TVNC_COMBINERECT` will increase the number of rectangles sent to the viewer, which will increase the CPU usage of both the server and the viewer.

Environment Variable | `TVNC_ICEBLOCKSIZE =` `{s}`
Summary | Set the block size for the interframe comparison engine (ICE) to `{s}` x `{s}` pixels. Setting `{s}` to 0 causes the ICE to compare full rectangles, as TurboVNC 1.2.x did.
Default Value | 256

Description
  If interframe comparison is enabled (see Section 7.1), then TurboVNC will compare each rectangle of each framebuffer update on a block-by-block basis and send only the blocks that have changed. This prevents large rectangles from being re-transmitted if only a few pixels in the rectangle have changed. Using smaller block sizes can decrease network usage if only a few pixels are changing between updates, but using smaller block sizes can also interfere with the Tight encoder’s ability to efficiently split rectangles into subrectangles, thus increasing server CPU usage (and sometimes increasing network usage as well, which runs counter to the purpose of interframe comparison.) Setting the block size to 0 causes the ICE to compare full framebuffer update rectangles, as TurboVNC 1.2.x did.
  The default block size of 256x256 was chosen based on extensive low-level experiments using the same set of RFB session captures that were used when designing the TurboVNC encoder. For most of those datasets, 256x256 blocks produced the lowest network and CPU usage, but actual mileage may vary. There were rare cases in which using 64x64 blocks or full-rectangle comparison produced better network and CPU usage.

Environment Variable | `TVNC_ICEDEBUG =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/Enable the ICE debugger
Default Value | Disabled

Description
  If interframe comparison is enabled (see Section 7.1), then setting this environment variable to 1 will cause the interframe comparison engine (ICE) to change the color of duplicate screen regions without culling them from the update stream. This allows you to easily see which applications are generating duplicate updates.

Environment Variable | `TVNC_MT =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/Enable multithreaded image encoding
Default Value | Disabled

Description
  See Section 7.5

Environment Variable | `VGL_NTHREADS =` `{n}`
Summary | Use `{n}` threads to perform image encoding
Default Value | `{n}` = the number of CPU cores in the system

Description
  See Section 7.5

Environment Variable | `TVNC_PROFILE =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/enable profiling output
Default Value | Disabled

Description
  If profiling output is enabled, then the TurboVNC Server will continuously benchmark itself and periodically print the throughput of various stages in its image pipeline to the Xvnc log file.

## 11.2 Viewer Settings

Environment Variable | `TVNC_PROFILE =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/enable profiling output
Platforms | Un*x, Mac (Java)
Default Value | Disabled

Description
  If profiling output is enabled, then the TurboVNC Viewer will continuously benchmark itself and periodically print the throughput of various stages in its image pipeline to the console.

Environment Variable | `VNC_VIA_CMD`, `VNC_TUNNEL_CMD`
Summary | SSH command-line templates for use with the `via` and `tunnel` options (respectively)
Platforms | All
Default Value | See below

When the `-via` option (or the `via` parameter in the Java viewer, along with the `extssh` parameter) is used, the TurboVNC Viewer reads the `VNC_VIA_CMD` environment variable (the Java viewer can also read this information from the `turbovnc.via` system property), expands patterns beginning with the “%” character, and uses the resulting command line to establish the secure tunnel to the VNC gateway. If `VNC_VIA_CMD` is not set, then this command line defaults to `/usr/bin/ssh -f -L %L:%H:%R %G sleep 20` (or `c:\cygwin\bin\ssh.exe -f -L %L:%H:%R %G sleep 20` if using the Windows native viewer.)

When the `-tunnel` option (or the `tunnel` parameter in the Java viewer, along with the `extssh` parameter) is used, the TurboVNC Viewer reads the `VNC_TUNNEL_CMD` environment variable (the Java viewer can also read this information from the `turbovnc.tunnel` system property), expands patterns beginning with the “%” character, and uses the resulting command line to establish the secure tunnel to the VNC server. If `VNC_TUNNEL_CMD` is not set, then this command line defaults to `/usr/bin/ssh -f -L %L:localhost:%R %H sleep 20` (or `c:\cygwin\bin\ssh.exe -f -L %L:localhost:%R %H sleep 20` if using the Windows native viewer.)

The following patterns are recognized in the `VNC_VIA_CMD` and `VNC_TUNNEL_CMD` environment variables (note that `%H`, `%L` and `%R` must be present in the command template, and `%G` must also be present if using the `-via` option):

`%%` | A literal “%”
`%G` | gateway machine name
`%H` | remote VNC machine name (if using the `-via` option, then this is specified from the point of view of the gateway)
`%L` | local TCP port number
`%R` | remote TCP port number

## 11.3 Java Viewer Settings

Java system properties are normally specified as command-line arguments to the Java executable. For example:

    java -Dmy.system.property={value} -jar MyClass.jar

However, since TurboVNC hides the Java command line inside of its startup scripts (or inside of an application bundle on OS X), the easiest way to set these properties is by using the `JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS` environment variable, which allows you to specify Java command-line arguments even if you don’t have access to the command line. For instance, on Linux you could execute:

    JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-Dturbovnc.turbojpeg=0 /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncviewer

to start the TurboVNC Viewer without JPEG acceleration.

Refer to the default `index.vnc` and `TurboVNC.jnlp` files installed with the TurboVNC Server for an example of how to specify Java command-line arguments in an applet or Java Web Start environment.

Java System Property | `turbovnc.forcealpha =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/enable back buffer alpha channel
Default Value | Enabled if using OpenGL Java 2D blitting, disabled otherwise

Description
  If this property is enabled, then the Java TurboVNC Viewer will use a TYPE_INT_ARGB_PRE (BGRA with pre-computed alpha channel) BufferedImage as its back buffer instead of a TYPE_INT_RGB (BGRX) BufferedImage. When using OpenGL blitting in Java 2D (normally accomplished by passing an argument of `-Dsun.java2d.opengl=true` to `java`), it is generally faster to draw an alpha-enabled BufferedImage to the screen, because otherwise glDrawPixels() has to set all of the alpha values itself (which can cause it to revert to an unaccelerated code path in some cases.)

  NOTE: this property is enabled by default when using Java 7 or later on Mac platforms, because OpenGL Java 2D blitting is the only option available.

Java System Property | `turbovnc.lionfs =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/enable the use of the OS X full-screen application feature
Default Value | Enabled if running on OS X 10.7 or later

Description
  When running in full-screen mode, the Java TurboVNC Viewer will normally try to take advantage of the full-screen application feature provided by OS X 10.7 and later, if available. Disabling this property will force the viewer to use its own built-in cross-platform “pseudo-full-screen” feature instead. This is useful mainly for testing.

Java System Property | `turbovnc.primary =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/enable the use of the X11 PRIMARY clipboard selection
Default Value | Enabled

Description
  X11 has two ways of copying/pasting text. When text is selected in most X11 applications, it is copied to the PRIMARY selection, and it can be pasted by pressing the middle mouse button. When text is explicitly copied using a “Copy” menu option or a hotkey (such as CTRL-C), it is copied to the CLIPBOARD selection, and it can only be pasted by explicitly selecting a “Paste” menu option or pressing a hotkey (such as CTRL-V.) Normally, on X11 platforms, the TurboVNC Viewer transfers the PRIMARY selection from client to server and, when receiving a clipboard update from the server, it sets both the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections with the server’s clipboard contents. Disabling this property will cause only the the CLIPBOARD selection to be transferred from client to server (in other words, the clipboard will not be transferred unless you explicitly copy something by using a menu option or hotkey), and clipboard changes from the server will only affect the client’s CLIPBOARD selection (in other words, you will have to explicitly paste the server’s clipboard contents by using a menu option or hotkey on the client.)

Java System Property | `turbovnc.swingdb =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/enable Swing double buffering
Default Value | Disabled

Description
  The Java TurboVNC Viewer has its own double buffering mechanism, so it normally disables the double buffering mechanism in Swing and Java 2D in order to increase performance. This also allows the viewer to achieve optimal performance under X11 without requiring MIT-SHM pixmap support. Although the viewer has been thoroughly tested, the `turbovnc.swingdb` system property is provided as a fallback in case issues are discovered when running it under a specific version of Java.

Java System Property | `turbovnc.tunnel`
Summary | SSH command-line template for use with the `Tunnel` and `ExtSSH` parameters

Description
  A more Java-friendly way of specifying the command line to use when establishing a secure tunnel with the `Tunnel` and `ExtSSH` parameters. See the `VNC_TUNNEL_CMD` environment variable above for more details.

Java System Property | `turbovnc.turbojpeg =` `0 | 1`
Summary | Disable/enable JPEG acceleration
Default Value | Enabled if the libjpeg-turbo JNI library is available

Description
  Normally, the Java TurboVNC Viewer will try to load the libjpeg-turbo JNI library and use it to accelerate the decompression of JPEG subrectangles. If this property is disabled, then the viewer will revert to using unaccelerated JPEG decompression. This is useful mainly for testing and benchmarking purposes.

Java System Property | `turbovnc.via`
Summary | SSH command-line template for use with the `Via` and `ExtSSH` parameters

Description
  A more Java-friendly way of specifying the command line to use when establishing a secure tunnel with the `Via` and `ExtSSH` parameters. See the `VNC_VIA_CMD` environment variable above for more details.