[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH] pipe-sink: auto-drain the pipe on sink resume

[Samo Pogačnik]

Dne 26.02.2018 (pon) ob 11:49 +0200 je Tanu Kaskinen napisal(a):
> On Sat, 2018-02-24 at 17:41 +0100, Samo Pogačnik wrote:
> > 
> > Added option auto_drain_pipe_on_resume to enable draining any
> > remaining
> > data from the pipe upon every pipe-sink resume out of suspend.
> > ---
> >  src/modules/module-pipe-sink.c | 37
> > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
> >  1 file changed, 36 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> I didn't review the patch yet, I just wanted to point out that the
> commit message doesn't explain what problem the patch solves. What's
> your use case?
> 
When a pipe reader fails, the pipe sink fills up the pipe and starts
dropping instead of writing new data. Old data remains in the pipe to
be consumed by the eventually recovered or replaced reader. By each new
drop a gap between the pipe content and new data to be written grows.
If the sink suspends while dropping, resuming from suspend is going to
clear the pipe and start writing new data into an empty pipe, thus
removing the gap (old, potentially irrelevant data).

I had also prepared a supplementary change (not yet posted), which
enables the pipe to auto-leak at the consumers end, whenever a pipe is
full. When a pipe is full, the size of the unwritten data is first read
to make room for the repeated write. This way dropping would be
replaced by leaking and the pipe always contains latest data
independent of when a real consumer reader get started, stopped or
replaced, ... However, i am not sure how to preserve content format,
if necessary.

I thought at some point, that this second change might be sufficient,
however it makes sense (in terms of pipe content relevance and data
processing time) to drain the whole pipe upon each resume from suspend.

regards, Samo