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
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