you could pass sockets via QMP a while ago, but listening to unix socket has been added there:
commit fe4831b1e7e7007ae15ae0470a06898660ab3877 Author: Marc-André Lureau <marcandre.lur...@gmail.com> Date: Tue Jan 13 17:57:51 2015 +0100 spice: add unix address support Teach qemu to set up a Spice server with a UNIX socket using the following arguments -spice unix,addr=path. Signed-off-by: Gerd Hoffmann <kra...@redhat.com> ** Changed in: qemu Status: New => Fix Released -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1020484 Title: RFE: Support spice via unix domain socket Status in QEMU: Fix Released Bug description: According to the man page, spice can be only used via TCP/IP in opposite to VNC, which can also be configured to listen on a unix domain socket. To make it easy to use spice without exposing the interface, please support unix domain sockets as well. I can try to provide a patch, if you can point me to the source code where TCP/IP socket is opened. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1020484/+subscriptions