Bug#400268: [Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#400268: Possible race condition on semaphores ?

[Andrew Moise]

On 1/13/07, Andrew Moise <chops at demiurgestudios.com> wrote:
>   I just saw this as well.  Playing movies for me, with xine and
> mplayer both, hangs instead of playing the movie, with a backtrace
> ending up in semop().  strace output from the offending process shows:

  After fooling around a bit, I discovered that I had a stray artsd
process hanging around (started by my user, now parented to init).  It
hadn't shown up as linked to any of the alsa libs when I searched, but
killing it seemed to make my sound work again.  It looked like it was
retaking the DIRECT_IPC_SEM_CLIENT semaphore when I upped it by hand,
but I could be wrong about that.
  Does KDE start artsd by default in Debian?  Is artsd supposed to
break alsa when it's running?