[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Markus Rechberger]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 5:18 PM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> '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.)
>

We'll have a closer look at it within the next 1-2 weeks. We also aim
at desktop users
but the product goes beyond that. Alot units have been shipped already
and the PA issue
becomes a bigger problem for us, we simply don't want to check all the
distributions
and different PA setups in order to get audio work just because PA is
limited in that
area...

Markus