[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio daemon not responging

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Wed, 2012-11-21 at 10:53 +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> 'Twas brillig, and Stefan Stefanov at 21/11/12 07:35 did gyre and gimble:
> > Colin ask me to post output from "pulseaudio -vvvvv". Here is the
> > result as attachment.
> 
> So, the attachment looks mostly OK, things start up sink is stated etc.
> all is looking well...
> 
> Can you do some other tests?
> 
> 1. Can you make sure no pulseaudio processes are running (keep killing
> them until they die!), then run: "pulseaudio --start" This should start
> PA in the background and give you control back to your shell. From what
> we've seen so far, it might be that it "sticks" and does not give you
> your shell back.

This has been already debugged a bit further in IRC. PulseAudio is
getting stuck in the module loading phase, so the daemon startup never
completes, and thus "pulseaudio --start" never finishes. The last
messages are about the alsa sink thread starting up, or if
module-udev-detect is commented out, then about the null sink thread
starting up. The problem seems to be either pa_thread_new() never
returning or something else getting stuck that is done both by the alsa
sink and the null sink soon after starting the thread. I suggested
putting a log message right after the pa_thread_new() call (to see if
pa_thread_new() returns or not), results from testing that suggestion
have not been reported so far.

-- 
Tanu