how is pulseaudio supposed to work?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 18.12.07 20:58, Nicolas Mailhot (nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net) wrote:

> > > Because it is a per-user/per-session daemon. Not a system daemon.
> > 
> > but there's only one set of speakers per system,
> 
> It's even worse even dirt-cheap systems have multiple audio outputs that
> can trivially be routed to different rooms just by running some audio
> cable (that was common way before any multi-head GFX card arrived on
> market).
> 
> So in addition to having several users contending on the same outputs
> you can have several sets of input/outputs used at once by different
> classes of users (think you want desktop you've got mail routed to the
> system PVR app currently recording late show for some other user?)
> 
> It's very unclear to me how this kind if setup is supposed to be handled
> in a PA world.

It's not so much a PA world, but more a CK world.

The basic idea is that CK knows which speakers belong to which seat,
and PA will honour that. Or actually, as soon as we get revoke() in
the kernel CK will enforce that, by forcibly kicking processes from
their devices if they don't comply.

However, multi-seat support is not really available in CK yet.

davidz and William Jon McCann can tell you more about this.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
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