[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH] daemon: Stop session-started PA daemon when exiting X session

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Wed, 2014-09-10 at 09:51 -0300, Felipe Sateler wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 6:18 AM, David Henningsson
> <david.henningsson at canonical.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 2014-04-13 20:21, Balint Reczey wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> This patch has been contributed through Debian's bug tracker.
> >> Please review it and consider accepting it to the project's code base if
> >> you find it useful.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Balint
> >
> >
> > Hi Balint,
> >
> > I wonder if the above can cause a problem if:
> >
> >  1) User starts X session + PulseAudio
> >  2) The same user switches to something else (e g, a VT or SSH session),
> > logs in, and starts using the PA daemon
> >  3) User logs out of X session
> >
> > Now PulseAudio is killed, while still being in use by the user.
> 
> I would think the daemon is per-session, not per-user, given that
> (until systemd --user works) we cannot track user stuff across
> sessions.

We can, module-systemd-login exists for that purpose. It creates a
client object for each session that the user has. As long as there are
any client objects in PulseAudio, the server won't shut down
automatically. When the last client exits, PulseAudio will exit after a
delay (20 seconds by default).

> But the core reason this patch is applied is that if pa is shutdown
> after alsa, pa will store a volume of 0 (as alsa shutdown mutes all
> the cards), so on reboot you have a 0 volume desktop. I think this is
> a worse outcome than the alternative, as it is terrible for
> accesibility.

Why does PulseAudio shut down after alsa? Could this be solved by
changing the auto-exit delay from 20 seconds to zero?

-- 
Tanu