pulseaudio causing crashing of applications

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 13.02.08 13:20, Andrew Farris (lordmorgul at gmail.com) wrote:

>>> the track time continues, and it then gains access to play to the audio 
>>> device again when returning from VT.  The crash is not expected; the 
>>> track time stopped, and rhythmbox does not respond to input.
>> PA provides the necessary information. It's just that Gst doesn't and
>> thus simply blocks waiting until it can write to the audio device the
>> next time, freezing the UI.
>>> So I guess this is an area for improvement to get the applications to 
>>> correctly handle this situation since it is designed behavior on 
>>> pulseaudio's end (to deny access while not being the active session).
>> I am not sure why this should be an issue at all. So Rhythmbox's UI
>> freezes while the session is inactive. So what? The session is
>> *inactive*! The UI doesn't need to be responsive.
>> Lennart
>
> Correction.  Rhythmbox froze during AND after the session was inactive, 
> making it permanently frozen (dead, defunct, useless).  This is definitely 
> wrong.  So its an issue with how gst (and by extension rhythmbox) handle 
> things, inappropriately in that case.  But it was a problem.

This sounds as if some other process blocked the audio device when
switching back the session so that PA was unable to reopen the device
and thus playback stays suspended.

Could you please check this, by running "pactl" in a terminal when
this happens again, and then type "list-sinks"? If your sound card
sink remains in SUSPENDED state, than this is most likely the issue.

Or, you might have hit the well-known issue HAL where it fails to
restore ACLs sometimes and thus PA is not able to reopen the device
properly. Check getfacl /dev/snd/*

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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