Bug#649641: Bug #649641: pulseaudio mutex issue on Alpha architecture

[Michael Cree]

The pulseaudio problem on Alpha is worse than just causing a crash in
iceweasel---pulseaudio cannot auto-detect audio cards via the udev
mechanism.

I have a number of audio cards (HDA-intel on a newer Radeon graphics
card, and M-Audio Revolution 5.1) in my Alpha XP1000 but these are not
detected despite the presence of module-udev-detect in the pulseaudio
system config.

Trying to play sound files (aplay -D pulse <some_sound_file>) plays no
sound and never returns.

Instrumenting and recompiling pulseaudio to print out the errno of the
failed call to pthread_mutex_unlock reveals an EPERM return.

Anyway, I think this is a fault in the kernel, not with pulseaudio.  If
I boot with a 2.6.38.x variant kernel pulseaudio works, the audio cards
are detected, I have the pleasant sounds of Pink Floyd playing again,
and iceweasel works without crashing.  Run with a newer kernel and
pulseaudio fails to work.

Other hints that this is a kernel problem introduced somewhere between
2.6.38 and 2.6.39 is that the eglibc test suite passes on 2.6.38 and
older kernels, but fails on 2.6.39 and newer kernels with failures in
mutex related tests.

Maybe this bug should be reassigned to the linux kernel?

Cheers
Michael.