PulseAudio Adds Memfd Transport Support

[duby229]

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.
How long did it take to make PulseAudio usable I wonder, and will it stay that way?
Maybe we should just call the opposite of the KISS principle the Lennart Poettering principle.
Does anyone remember why LibreSSL got started? Cutting the unused crap out of OpenSSL made it more secure and stable!

"You are -not- alone", he says ominously.....

[Ericg]

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.

That's fine. But the idea of "lets build a system out of hundreds of 1mb programs" makes me and many others actively cringe. "one program that does one thing really well" only works until you have to do something complicated. I defer to neil brown-- who is far more qualified than anyone on here--

One of the big weaknesses of the "do one job and do it well" approach is that those individual tools didn't really combine very well. sort, join, cut, paste, cat, grep, comm etc make a nice set of tools for simple text-database work, but they all have slightly different ways of identifying and selecting fields and sort orders etc. You can sort-of stick them together with pipes and shell scripts, but it is rather messy and always error prone.
I remember being severly disillusioned by this in my early days. I read some article that explained how a "spell" program can be written to report the spelling errors in a file. It uses 'tr' to split into words, then "sort" and "uniq" to get a word list, then "comm" to find the differences. "cool" I thought. Then I looked at the actual "spell" program on my university's Unix installation. It used a special 'dcomm' (or something like that) which knew about "dictionary ordering" (Which ignores case - sometimes). Suddenly the whole illusion came shattering down. Lots of separate tools only do 90% of the work. To do really complete work, you need real purpose-built tools. "do one thing and do it well" is good for prototypes, not for final products.

How long did it take to make PulseAudio usable I wonder, and will it stay that way?

Personally? Pulse hasn't given me a problem since Ubuntu 9.04-- 8.10 gave me real hassles, but 9.04 was solid, and its been solid ever since.

Maybe we should just call the opposite of the KISS principle the Lennart Poettering principle.

Troll comment.

Does anyone remember why LibreSSL got started? Cutting the unused crap out of OpenSSL made it more secure and stable!

It wasn't just "unused crap" it was the very serious design mistakes, like including their own memory allocation call. This wasn't just an issue of "it got complicated," this was an issue of "The developers made several mistakes that a first year computer science student would've known was a bad idea."

[Ericg]

the only one insanely stupid here is you.

Pal, cool it.

[liam]

That's fine. But the idea of "lets build a system out of hundreds of 1mb programs" makes me and many others actively cringe. "one program that does one thing really well" only works until you have to do something complicated. I defer to neil brown-- who is far more qualified than anyone on here--



Personally? Pulse hasn't given me a problem since Ubuntu 9.04-- 8.10 gave me real hassles, but 9.04 was solid, and its been solid ever since.



Troll comment.



It wasn't just "unused crap" it was the very serious design mistakes, like including their own memory allocation call. This wasn't just an issue of "it got complicated," this was an issue of "The developers made several mistakes that a first year computer science student would've known was a bad idea."

Damn you!!!!
That Neil Brown quote was mine:<
I love trotting that gem out whenever folks bring out the ole "do one thing and do it well" without using nuance.
Btw, I found, possibly, an even better one recently. HOWEVER, because of YOUR I'm keeping this one all to myself
Arun has been doing a lot of good work with PA. I just wish he had more time to devote to it.

[wagaf]

It's just amazing how much hate those new higher level Linux components can generate.

Maybe old school people afraid of what they know becoming obsolete. Not surprised to see Arch users hating on Pulse.

We're not in 1980. People want to do more stuff with their computers.
More and more basic tasks are expected by users to be fully automated and transparent.
Things must work out of the box just like users expect. No,spending the day hacking around editing bash scripts won't do it.
That requires more complex, higher level software components, like a userspace sound server and API, an actual system service manager that is not just a hideous collection of bash scripts and macros, etc.

[SaucyJack]

It's just amazing how much hate those new higher level Linux components can generate.

Maybe old school people afraid of what they know becoming obsolete. Not surprised to see Arch users hating on Pulse.

We're not in 1980. People want to do more stuff with their computers.
More and more basic tasks are expected by users to be fully automated and transparent.
Things must work out of the box just like users expect. No,spending the day hacking around editing bash scripts won't do it.
That requires more complex, higher level software components, like a userspace sound server and API, an actual system service manager that is not just a hideous collection of bash scripts and macros, etc.

For real? 'Oh he's just an arch user, they're like that so we'll continue to ignore the horrible issues'.
But really what I think what you're actually trying to say is 'I fixed your problem by dumping a pile of shit in your front yard and it's awesome. How dare you criticize it.'.
Modern components are awesome. But they have to, you know, not suck.

[jrch2k8]

For real? 'Oh he's just an arch user, they're like that so we'll continue to ignore the horrible issues'.
But really what I think what you're actually trying to say is 'I fixed your problem by dumping a pile of shit in your front yard and it's awesome. How dare you criticize it.'.
Modern components are awesome. But they have to, you know, not suck.

Again arch user here too, PA is absolutely trouble free for me since 2010.

Chipsets i've owned:
Asus Xonar
SB Live 5.1(love it but my xeon board is matx :** )

AMD(several brands):
760g
880g
970
990FX

Intel
G41
B85(current with a Xeon 1231-v3)

Speakers i've used or still use

Logitech h540 (headphones)
Cambridge Soundworks(4.1) SPDIF (they old but i love the sound)
Logitech Z506
Couple of old Bluetooth headphones i have around from Motorola days

Software i use:
Kodi 16.1
Rhytmbox
Amarok(when i'm in plasma)
Audacity when i'm converting old music and stuff
Mpv
Chromium/Firefox(youtube and stuff ofc)
Zoiper for voip

Again, since 2010 i have no glitch, no need to touch a single conf file, no latency issue, no manual configuration(even my bluetooth headphones are automagic), no noise, no weird quirky sounds, no volume issues, no mixing issues(Even when incoming voip call, PA is smart enough to mute sound and unmute ring, etc). no sound difference with windows(skyrim partition basically), no netflix issues, no codec issue(in fact my arch play more formats than windows 7 lol), no steam game issue, no issues with Wine games, no issues with Virtual machines,etc.

Notice all this is standard archlinux OOB config, i've never edited anything related to PA in my systems

So, i'm not saying your lieing or anything but after so many years and so many system i strongly believe there is a hardware/Alsa/PA issue at work here and you should report it instead of hating for whatever reason.

If this were an actual design or software issue it should be reproducible in any system but since is not (Btw i never had issues with fedora either in case anyone wonders), then there is an actual problem in your system(and some others statistically speaken) peculiar setting, Hence PA is just fine since for most(see i'm not saying all) people it does its work just bloody fine in most(again not all) system configurations.

now feel free to keep ranting or actually do something about it and open bug reports(i would open 1 for Alsa and 1 for PA if i were you).

Lennart haters need to be more creative, beating the same old horse over and over again is getting old really fast

[jrch2k8]

For real? 'Oh he's just an arch user, they're like that so we'll continue to ignore the horrible issues'.
But really what I think what you're actually trying to say is 'I fixed your problem by dumping a pile of shit in your front yard and it's awesome. How dare you criticize it.'.
Modern components are awesome. But they have to, you know, not suck.

Again arch user here too, PA is absolutely trouble free for me since 2010.

Chipsets i've owned:
Asus Xonar
SB Live 5.1(love it but my xeon board is matx :** )

AMD(several brands):
760g
880g
970
990FX

Intel
G41
B85(current with a Xeon 1231-v3)

Speakers i've used or still use

Logitech h540 (headphones)
Cambridge Soundworks(4.1) SPDIF (they old but i love the sound)
Logitech Z506
Couple of old Bluetooth headphones i have around from Motorola days

Software i use:
Kodi 16.1
Rhytmbox
Amarok(when i'm in plasma)
Audacity when i'm converting old music and stuff
Mpv
Chromium/Firefox(youtube and stuff ofc)
Zoiper for voip

Again, since 2010 i have no glitch, no need to touch a single conf file, no latency issue, no manual configuration(even my bluetooth headphones are automagic), no noise, no weird quirky sounds, no volume issues, no mixing issues(Even when incoming voip call, PA is smart enough to mute sound and unmute ring, etc). no sound difference with windows(skyrim partition basically), no netflix issues, no codec issue(in fact my arch play more formats than windows 7 lol), no steam game issue, no issues with Wine games, no issues with Virtual machines,etc.

Notice all this is standard archlinux OOB config, i've never edited anything related to PA in my systems

So, i'm not saying your lieing or anything but after so many years and so many system i strongly believe there is a hardware/Alsa/PA issue at work here and you should report it instead of hating for whatever reason.

If this were an actual design or software issue it should be reproducible in any system but since is not (Btw i never had issues with fedora either in case anyone wonders), then there is an actual problem in your system(and some others statistically speaken) peculiar setting, Hence PA is just fine since for most(see i'm not saying all) people it does its work just bloody fine in most(again not all) system configurations.

now feel free to keep ranting or actually do something about it and open bug reports(i would open 1 for Alsa and 1 for PA if i were you).

Lennart haters need to be more creative, beating the same old horse over and over again is getting old really fast

[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..

[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.