PulseAudio Adds Memfd Transport Support

[mlau]

Sounds more like you have an issue with ALSA rather than PulseAudio.

ALSA alone doesn't do that pop noise when it restores volume, only the PA daemon when it starts.

[bkor]

Adding that PulseAudio just works for many years. No crackling noises, usually around 0% CPU (Pentium N3700.. it is not fast), very good quality sound. For people experiencing issues, maybe look into old configuration bits you still have?

[nanonyme]

I use Linux since 2007 and can't understand why people hate pulse audio so much.. It simply works, and I never have to think about it until a see people complaining on phoronix..

Because back in 2007 many desktop users still had sound cards moved from machine to machine originating from 90's where hardware mixing was a normal thing to have. PA ideology that software mixing is the only thing that exists makes a lot of sense these days. Per-user volume control is something people didn't feel they needed, it had to be sold and people needed to get accustomed to it. Now it's a normal thing to have. Windows users have equivalent of PA in both regards

[mjog]

Playing a game through Wine right now, with Pulse active. No obvious problems to report. Hell, thats even an extra abstraction layer ontop.

Yeah, I used to do just this all the time. Happily there's only one game left that I'm interested in that hasn't been ported to Linux - those that have all work natively using PA no problem at all.

[SpyroRyder]

So I've actually also experienced that crackling problem on Pulse. It was caused by Firefox and usually went away if I restarted Pulse. I had it for about 3 months and then it never came back. However, that was the first problem I have had with pulse since early 2009. I've never had any issues with games, never with audio programs such as audacity or that skype call recorder, and never with any video players. The design could be better (flat volume isn't needed on desktop machines) but like someone above said what we really need is a total redesign of the audio subsystem. It sucks worse than the graphics subsystem ever has

[patrakov]

Now on topic.

I believe that one thing is unfixably wrong with PulseAudio in relation to secure application containers. Namely, it performs work (eats CPU) on behalf of clients (other processes). The problem is that a client can, even from a secure container, overload PulseAudio (up to the point of it exhausting its real-time budget and being killed by the kernel with SIGKILL, thus denying service to other clients) by sending a ton of streams which need CPU-heavy resampling, or by repeatedly saying "forget what I have just sent, here is the new version".

Dmix didn't have this "assigned work" problem at all, each process did its resampling and mixing by itself, with the CPU time eaten only by it and accounted only to it. But dmix means shared read-write access to the mixing buffer and the sound card buffer (which is unacceptable for secure containers), as well as inability to move streams to a different sound card on the fly, or mix to a "strange" device (such as a BlueTooth headset or a software DTS encoder) which is not a shared memory buffer with PCM samples that the hardware reads from. So not a solution either.

[oleid]

... and never played games.

Some old self versions used to make problems with pulse. But that's long past...

[Ericg]

... and never played games.

Playing a game through Wine right now, with Pulse active. No obvious problems to report. Hell, thats even an extra abstraction layer ontop.

[Delgarde]

Am I the only one who believes in the KISS principle? The smaller a program the easier it is to fix bugs, that should be obvious.

Having many small problems instead of a few large ones doesn't actually make things any simpler or easier to fix - it just moves the problem from interactions within a complex program to interactions between simpler ones. The complexity still exists.

[tessio]

I use Linux since 2007 and can't understand why people hate pulse audio so much.. It simply works, and I never have to think about it until a see people complaining on phoronix..