Glitch-Free PulseAudio in Rawhide

[Kevin Kofler]

Lennart Poettering <mzerqung <at> 0pointer.de> writes:
> Hmm, this bug seems to be triggered only by KDE. Apparently in KDE PA
> is not configured for module-x11-xsmp? (could anyone who actually runs
> KDE check this?)

Sounds like that's it, I don't see this module loaded in list-modules in pacmd. 
kde-settings-pulseaudio simply starts up pulseaudio -D, I take it that we 
should do some extra configuration?

> > Then there's this weird issue:
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=361891
> 
> What's weird about this issue is primarily the setup (i.e. running
> arts on top of pa).

Call that setup "weird" if you want, but given that KDE 3 apps _only_ support 
aRts for sound and PA can't emulate the aRts protocol (and I don't blame it for 
that, given that aRts does things like decoding in the sound server; heck, it 
can even show video! KDE 4's modular Phonon is much better there, that finally 
dissociates showing video and decoding audio and video from the sound server, 
and is also much more flexible, supporting several solutions for both decoding 
and the sound server, but KDE 3 apps aren't going away overnight), running aRts 
on top of PA is the _only_ way to get the sound from those apps into PA (and 
thus avoid a sound device conflict with the many apps which _don't_ support 
aRts).

> If you trigger one of those CPU overload issues, than this is most
> likely due to the software entering some kind of busy loop. If you
> want to fix this, you need to find out why we enter this busy
> loop. Apparently the operation that should normally sleep for IO
> doesn't sleep for IO in this case. Usually this means that an IO
> condition that was signalled earlier was not handled as it should and
> thus not reset. Unfortunately bugs like this don't leave any useful
> coredumps, error messages or back traces and so can only be fixed by
> spending some time in gdb to figure out what happens.

This is hard to debug indeed. :-( So I take it you have no idea where to start 
with that?

Please don't take this post as a flame, I'm really interested in getting things 
fixed and willing to do my part of the work. Sorry for having unintentionally 
provoked that small flamewar, this wasn't my intention, I guess my frustration 
with those bugs made me step over the fine line. :-(

        Kevin Kofler