[pulseaudio-discuss] Multi user access to PulseAudio

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sun, 2016-09-11 at 13:30 +0200, Pali Rohár wrote:
> On Sunday 11 September 2016 13:10:53 Ralph Benzinger wrote:
> > Actually looking at "what is wrong with system mode?", all security
> > issues are moot for me, as I own all the users on the system.  But
> > the point
> > 
> >     When in system mode, shared memory data transport is disabled for
> >     security reasons, which means: much higher memory usage and CPU
> >     load in system mode
> > 
> > does sound bad.  Could someone quantify this statement so that one
> > might see if this is an actual issue (rather than a mere fact) on a
> > modern desktop system?

I doubt that the statement in the wiki is based on any real benchmarks.
I believe the performance benefit of shm is negligible in most cases.
With very low latencies it starts to matter, though.

For example, I worked on the Nokia N900, a smartphone with 600 MHz
single-core ARM processor, and we used PulseAudio in the system mode
without shared memory, and the lack of shm caused no performance
problems. The same thing with the later N9 phone.

> I already suggested some pulseaudio cmdline switch or config option to 
> enable shared memory data transport also for system wide mode. But do 
> not know if some actions were taken or not...

Nothing has happened on that front.

-- 
Tanu