Jack source removed for no reason

[Sean Greenslade]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2025 at 08:05:59AM +0000, jargaud at tixeo.com wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I've created a jack source and a jack sink a month ago on a Linux Debian 12 machine (PulseAudio version is 14.2) with the following commands:
> 
> pactl load-module module-jack-sink sink_name=raw_device_out client_name=raw_device_out
> pactl load-module module-jack-source source_name=raw_device_in client_name=raw_device_in
> 
> The jack source (raw_device_in) creation was confirmed at the time because it was found in the output of the following command:
> pactl list sinks
> 
> A month later, without modifying the machine or restarting it, the same command
> 
> pactl list sinks
> no longer displays this jack source raw_device_in in its output. The sink raw_device_out, however, is still present when i run
> 
> pactl list sources
> The PulseAudio logs do not mention any problems.
> 
> The problem may be more with jack module than with PulseAudio, but just in case I'm asking: does anyone know if a source can be automatically deleted by PulseAudio ?
> 
> Feel free to ask any additional information.
> Thank you and have a nice day !

Hi, Julien.

I personally use module-jack-source and module-jack-sink in my own
desktop PC setup, and I've never experienced either module unexpectedly
being unloaded. I've definitely had this setup running for over a month,
with many sleep-wake cycles on that PC.

Do note that verson 14.2 is now 5 years old, but I don't see any
suspicious changes in the JACK module code since then. A quick glance
through the module-jack-sink code shows what I expected; only hard
errors from JACK would cause an uncommanded module unload.

Are you using the module-jackdbus-detect module? That's the only other
thing in Pulse that knowinly unloads other jack modules.

The other thing I would look into is what is going on in the JACK side.
What do you have the virtual JACK sink routed to within JACK? Have you
looked at the JACK logs?

If there's no smoking gun in JACK, I would increase the logging level on
Pulse to debug and reproduce the issue. That might give more clues as to
what is happening.

--Sean