[Pkg-pulseaudio-devel] Bug#491270: pulseaudio: PulseAudio freezes the boot process in some situations

[CJ van den Berg]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 08:44:51AM +0200, Gabriel Kerneis wrote:
> in the following situation, pulseaudio freezes the boot process:
> - pulseaudio system start enabled (in /etc/default/pulseaudio)
> - some bad permissions in the /dev directory (due to bug #491114 in my case).

The pulseaudio daemon does not background itself until it’s initial
start-up is complete. This includes opening devices configured in
default.pa (directly or indirectly via the *-detect modules). This is
common daemon design and is usually considered best practice.

If opening a device causes pulseaudio to block indefinitely, then the
device needs to be fixed (as it was in your case). I don’t see what
pulseaudio can (or should) do about this.

> In my case, the error message was:
> Jul 18 07:22:56 tatanka pulseaudio[2715]: main.c: 
>   setrlimit(RLIMIT_NICE, (31, 31)) failed: Operation not permitted
> Jul 18 07:22:56 tatanka pulseaudio[2715]: main.c: 
>   setrlimit(RLIMIT_RTPRIO, (9, 9)) failed: Operation not permitted

These are not fatal errors. They are warnings and do not effect
pulseaudio’s start-up. They indicate only that pulseaudio may no be
running with the process priorities requested in the configuration
files.

> In understand that the origin of the bug doesn't lie in pulseaudio, and that
> is has been fixed already (see #491114). But, whatever causes pulseaudio to
> fail its startup, I think it shouldn't freeze the whole boot process, but
> rather die gracefully.

I don’t see how bad permissions could cause pulseaudio block
indefinitely on a device. What makes you think that is what happened?
I my experience pulseaudio exits with a permission denied error if it
does not have enough permissions to open a device.

-- 
CJ van den Berg

mailto:cj at vdbonline.com
  xmpp:cj at vdbonline.com