[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH] Run a user specified program on suspend/resume.

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Fri, 2015-08-21 at 23:29 +0300, Joonas Govenius wrote:
> This allows calling a user-specified external program whenever a
> source or sink is suspended or resumed (by specifying
> external_suspend_handler="<path_to_executable>" as an option to
> module-suspend-on-idle). The external executable is called
> with "--suspended" or "--resumed" followed by "--source
> <source_name>" or "--sink <sink_name>".
> 
> My use case for this feature is to cut the power to my active
> speakers in order to eliminate hissing. I've been using the patch
> (applied to pulseaudio 4.0) on Ubuntu 14.04 since February. I
> have not tested it with later versions, except to check that it
> compiles. I could do some further testing if the patch is
> otherwise acceptable/useful enough.
> 
> Some things I'm not sure about:
> 
> * What happens on Windows? Does fork() work and if not, what does
>   it return? Maybe some of the code should be wrapped
>   with "#ifndef OS_IS_WIN32".
> 
> * Security considerations? This might provide a sneaky way to run
>   malicious code repeatedly, but only if you have write access to
>   the config file. In that case you are probably screwed in a
>   multitude of ways already...

Write access to the file system is not needed. The only thing that is
needed is access to PulseAudio, because you can load modules also at
runtime. Using the module arguments to pass the executable doesn't seem
safe enough. Maybe we could add suspend-on-idle.conf, and have that the
only way to specify the external_suspend_handler option?

-- 
Tanu