[pulseaudio-tickets] [PulseAudio] #381: bug in the EsounD emulation of PulseAudio causing gnome-panel to freeze

[PulseAudio]

#381: bug in the EsounD emulation of PulseAudio causing gnome-panel to freeze
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  Reporter:  timrichardson    |       Owner:  lennart
      Type:  defect           |      Status:  new    
  Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:         
 Component:  module-esound-*  |    Severity:  major  
Resolution:                   |    Keywords:         
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Comment (by timrichardson):

 Here is why I think it is a pulseaudio bug:

 1) "Esound" is actually part of pulseaudio now, as I understand it. I use
 the Debian package "pulseaudio-esound-compat" which is described as a
 "drop in replacements for the ESD sound server". It does this so the gnome
 applications think they are still using ESD, but it is pulseaudio code
 doing the work. So the call in the trace to esd_sample_play is in
 pulseaudio code, I think, despite appearances.

 2) after the freeze happens, I can stop the gdm session (eg sudo
 /etc/init.d/gdm stop
 Normally this would clean up user processes. But after the freeze, the
 remainging user processes include pulseaudio.
 The only way to be able to restart gdm is to kill pulseaudio, and it needs
 a hard kill (-9)
 So when this bug happens, the pulseaudio daemon gets stuck. So that's
 another reason why I think it is a pulseaudio bug

 3)  The Ubuntu thread I link to says that the connection between this
 pulseaudio freeze and the freeze of gnome-panel is: gconf daemon is locked
 by pulseaudio, and pulseaudio then freezes, stopping many other things in
 the gnome-desktop.

 That is something about which I have no clue, but if it's true, it seems
 to be pretty poor behaviour of pulseaudio daemon. Below are the processes
 that are left alive after the gdm stop (normally they would all have
 exited), and you can see the gconfd is among them.

 (and of these, pulseaudio is the root problem. Killing bonobo-activation-
 server doesn't help)

 gconfd-2[[BR]]
 Pulseaudio[[BR]]
 Gconf-helper[[BR]]
 Gnome-panel[[BR]]
 Bonobo-activation-server[[BR]]
 Gnome-terminal[[BR]]
 Gnome-pty-helper

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Ticket URL: <http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/381#comment:7>
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