[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH 1/3] alsa: fix infinite loop with Intel HDMI LPE

[David Henningsson]

On 2017-12-30 10:54, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
> 2017-12-29 20:37 GMT+08:00 Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi>:
>> On Fri, 2017-12-29 at 11:46 +0800, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
>>> 2017-12-28 18:09 GMT+08:00 Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi>:
>>>> The Intel HDMI LPE driver works in a peculiar way when the HDMI cable is
>>>> not plugged in: any written audio is immediately discarded and underrun
>>>> is reported. That resulted in an infinite loop, because PulseAudio tried
>>>> to keep the buffer filled, which was futile since the written audio was
>>>> immediately consumed/discarded.
>>>>
>>>> This patch adds special handling for the LPE driver: if the active port
>>>> of the sink is unavailable, the sink suspends itself. A new suspend
>>>> cause is added: PA_SUSPEND_UNAVAILABLE.
>>> I think this is not a complete fix. There was a case in the past where
>>> some other card started eating samples too quickly (some Radeon?
>>> unfortunately, can't find it now). While blacklisting one known bad
>>> driver helps, I think it would be better to detect the misbehavior at
>>> runtime, based on the number of samples written and the wall-clock
>>> time. If the card stalls or eats samples too quickly, set a flag that
>>> it misbehaves, accept the xrun, and then set it to off when
>>> convenient.
>>>
>>> Sorry, I have no time to help with the code :(
>> Did that other sample-eating sound card exhibit the behaviour only when
>> unplugged? With the LPE driver we know that we can resume once the
>> cable is plugged in again. If we don't take the jack state into
>> consideration, then we don't know when we should try resuming.
> Yes, it was only when unplugged. The thread (found it!) starts here:
>
> http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipermail/alsa-devel/2014-September/081365.html
>
> David: do you know whether it has been fixed in the kernel in that case?

No idea. And I've switched graphics card since, so I can't test either.

// David