pulseaudio deeply unreliable (Fedora 10)

Raymond C. Rodgers sinful622 at gmail.com
Fri Mar 6 22:17:50 UTC 2009


Neil Bird wrote:
>
>   OK, I've had a google, and a bit of tinkering with config. files, 
> and I'm not really getting anywhere.  PA was working OK for me in 
> Fedora 8, but ever since I upgraded F8 to F10, it's been a right PITA.
>
>   It'll either continually stutter (e.g., when playing music often 1-2 
> times each track) or hiccough and crash under CPU load (firefox 
> loading can kill it, for example).
>
>   Indeed, with my wife playing 'listen', CPU usage is PA itself is 
> some ~20% or more.  I have tried the 'tsched=0' hack, but that doesn't 
> seem to change anything (yes, I restarted PA).
>
>
>   I've seen PA quit itself due to "excessive CPU usage" (I've taken to 
> running it in an xterm to see when it's gone/what errors it's 
> reporting).  I tried the max cpu flag I found in the PA daemon conf. 
> file, but all *that* did was just report 'Killed' when it died.
>
>   It just seems deeply unreliable.  I can fairly reliably stuff it by 
> running realplay (listening to streamed radio) under padsp, and then 
> launching mplayer.
>
>   The only odd thing I see is some message about the ALSA and/or the 
> kernel reporting a range of 22.0 to 22.0 db or something, "indicating 
> a bug in the kernel driver".
>
>
>   So, what to try?  Most googles of my symptoms lead to people who've 
> had enough and removed it.  I did even see one report trying to blame 
> nVidia's drivers (which, regardless of veracity, is no excuse given 
> that it was OK before).
>
>   I'd *rather* get to the bottom of the problem(s), even if it's 
> raising bug reports and patching for now, but I'm really just fed up 
> with the thing now.  If I can't get it going within a week, next 
> weekend it's off the machine for good.
>
I'm getting the stuttering, static, and crashes too, and periodically 
something will happen with pulseaudio that results in thousands (at 
least) of identical error messages appearing in /var/log/messages. I 
looked up the error (I can't remember what it is off-hand) and the 
pulseaudio guys are saying that it's a bug in alsa, and the alsa guys 
seem to be working on a bug directly related to that error, but the 
symptoms of the bug they're fixing don't match what I'm seeing with pulse...

Frankly, I don't care where the hell the problem is, I just want my 
audio working clearly and properly. I'll post the error message when I 
get a chance, but even if alsa is the problem it doesn't explain why 
I've seen pulseaudio die between the time I start it in a terminal 
window and the time Banshee finishes loading so I can actually play some 
audio.

Raymond




More information about the fedora-list mailing list