[pulseaudio-discuss] Frequent trivially-reproducible client hangs with stable-queue PA

[Nix]

On 23 Feb 2010, David Henningsson said:

>> well. (I'd use the ALSA->PA plugin, but as reported earlier, this
>> doesn't work either, stuttering like crazy and frequently locking up.
>
> Even with this patch?
>
> http://launchpadlibrarian.net/37640450/0001-pulse-Fix-buffer-pointer-issues-improves-recovering-.patch

Yes, that's installed. Most of the failures above happen only when the
PulseAudio native libraries are used. (I've turned the ALSA plugin off
because it stutters and hangs too much to be usable.)

I just tried totem. It doesn't hang, but the audio stutters insanely,
and after a couple of fast-forwards/rewinds, nothing is audible but
stuttering. I've tried to record it, but parec has no man page and it is
not obvious how to use it, e.g.:

nix at mutilate 33 /home/nix% parec --device="Monitor of Internal Audio Analog Stereo" --file-format=flac --record --verbose > foo.flac
Failed to open audio file.

-- wtf? I'm recording! Audio file? Maybe --file-format is the *input*
format, though I'd expect it to be an output format to allow
transcoding. Let's try dropping the file format and just trying to
record in whatever format parec wants to:

nix at mutilate 34 /home/nix% parec --device="Monitor of Internal Audio Analog Stereo" --record --verbose > foo
Opening a recording stream with sample specification 's16le 2ch 44100Hz' and channel map 'front-left,front-right'.
Connection established.
Stream error: Invalid argument

No good :(


Hm, I wonder if the totem stuttering may be related to this intermittent
problem:

Feb 23 23:09:57 mutilate err: alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us up to write new data to the device, but there was actually nothing to write!
Feb 23 23:09:57 mutilate err: alsa-sink.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_hda_intel'. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers.
Feb 23 23:09:57 mutilate err: alsa-sink.c: We were woken up with POLLOUT set -- however a subsequent snd_pcm_avail() returned 0 or another value < min_avail.
Feb 23 23:11:16 mutilate warning: ratelimit.c: 58 events suppressed
Feb 23 23:14:24 mutilate warning: ratelimit.c: 76 events suppressed

(a bug new in 2.6.32, apparently: I first saw that message a day after
upgrading.)

Maybe this whole thing is a 2.6.32 kernel bug... I'll try rebooting into
2.6.31 shortly...

... no, no such luck. The log messages above are not correlated with the
stuttering nor the hangs. They don't seem to happen (as much?) with
2.6.31, but both the totem/alsa-plugin stuttering and the xine/mplayer
hangs continue with that kernel.

It's amazing how annoying this bug is. A good thing I don't use GNOME,
or I suspect the event sounds would be causing random app hangs across
the whole desktop.