pulseaudio causing crashing of applications

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 31.01.08 01:31, Andrew Farris (lordmorgul at gmail.com) wrote:

>
> Warren Togami wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>> Is anyone else seeing regular crashing of applications like pidgin, 
>> mplayer or xine caused by pulseaudio?  Did anybody manage to get useful 
>> backtraces out of this?
>> Thanks,
>> Warren Togami
>> wtogami at redhat.com
>
> I just had an issue with rhythmbox locking up while playing through 
> pulseaudio.  It locked only when I switched to VT1 where root was logged 
> in, and it immediately stopped playing and froze.  I've got the backtrace 
> for all threads, but the top few are below.  The rest is rather long so I 
> won't post it yet.  I haven't had rhythmbox do this before tonight.
>
> Usually it will stop playing through the sink device (it is still trying 
> to) until returning to the login that is running rhythmbox, but this time 
> it actually froze and did not keep streaming to the sink.

This is somewhat expected behaviour. Access to the audio device
follows the active session on the display. I.e. if you switch VTs than
ConsoleKit+HAL will change the ACLs of the audio devices and tell PA
to stop accessing the audio device. This will cause playback to pause
for all applications accessing PA. However, as soon as you switch back
the session, the playback should continue. This is not perfect
however, since we don't inform Gst/Rhyhtmbox that the audio device is
temporarily stopped (there's no way to do that afaik).

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
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