[pulseaudio-discuss] Sending all audio out S/PDIF

[Nasa]

----- "Lennart Poettering" <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 01.09.09 00:07, Nasa (nasa01 at comcast.net) wrote:
> 
> > I finally got some sound to work.  I can start playing some music,
> but after 2 - 10
> > minutes sound stops.  Depending on the player it may freeze or it
> may continue with 
> > out noticing sound has stopped...
> > 
> > Here's what gets logged in my syslog file (it can be repeated a
> couple of times):
> > 
> > When pulseaudio crashes:
> > Aug 31 04:25:43 ice-car pulseaudio[3109]: rtpoll.c: Assertion 'usec
> <= ((pa_usec_t) 1000000ULL)*60ULL*60ULL' failed at
> pulsecore/rtpoll.c:516, function pa_rtpoll_set_timer_relative().
> Aborting.
> > Aug 31 04:34:31 ice-car pulseaudio[7316]: pid.c: Stale PID file,
> overwriting.
> 
> This is almost certainly triggered by a bug in your audio driver
> which
> overflows in snd_pcm_delay()/snd_pcm_avail() which causes PA's time
> calculations to overflow as a result which is then caught by this
> assert. PA >= 0.9.15 is actually very explicit about this issue and
> tells you in syslog the driver that is broken and how exactly the
> function overflowed.
> 
> Many of these unreliabilities of the timing primitives have been
> fixed
> in the drivers in the recent passed. Make sure you run a fully
> patched
> recent kernel.
> 
> And of course, in Fedora we tend to ship a kernel that has these
> issues mostly fixed.
> 
> Lennart
Well, 

I happen to be using Ubuntu for this particular machine...  And I didn't see them
releasing an updated kernel for 9.04.  However, I did see quite a few bug reports 
that seem related/similar to what I was describing:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/345627?comments=all
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/374002
http://n2.nabble.com/pulseaudio-breaks-after-update-today-td3312334.html
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/jaunty/+source/linux/+bug/345627/+viewstatus

from this reading I came across two potential solutions (not home to try out right now), however 
they seemed aimed at fixing crackling/scratchy sound (which my setup does show, prior to it 
crashing)

1. add option snd-intel8x0 ac97_quirk=3 to alsa-base in /etc/modprobe.
2. add tsched=0 option to module-alsa-sink

Do you know if these are good suggestions and/or if there are better ones?  

Thanks again.

Nasa