[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Markus Rechberger at 27/11/09 06:33 did gyre and gimble:
> When temporary changing over to the PA group the memory mappings
> should be possible,
> shouldn't it? I won't get around to check this before the end of next
> week actually...

To be honest I'm really not sure what you are trying to solve by moving 
the groups around...

The SHM memory issue is simply that it doesn't work under system-wide 
mode. Moving groups around is nothing to do with this.

System wide mode *requires* that any user wanting to output sound *must* 
be in the pulse-access group. This is why reconfiguring it in the 
background puts a massive amount of administration overhead onto the 
user to ensure all their users are configured in this way.



In many ways, a system wide PA that properly sandboxes user's 
connections/streams according to username and/or other ACL based rules 
and had full integration with consolekit at that level could solve these 
issues (doing away with the pulse-access group requirement etc), but the 
SHM issue becomes a problem then which is quite a big issue.

I'm really not qualified to comment on this, but it's not a problem 
unique to yourself. mpd is typically configured in a similar way and 
suffers the same problems.

Bearing in mind that PA is typically aimed at desktop users, this really 
isn't a massive problem, but it's still one that crops up (and lets face 
it everyone is vocal when something is perceived as breaking and no one 
shouts praises for saving battery power and for making multidevice 
management work etc. etc.)

Col

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Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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