Bug#777178: pulseaudio: Pulseaudio often crashes. Makes crackling sound on (re)start

[Javier Cantero]

I have been bitten by this bug as well. pavucontrol provokes the death
of PA daemon due to the failed assertion, then PA is relaunched, but
dies again when pavucontrol reconnects, and so on in an infinite loop .
Visually, pavucontrol seems frozen, but in the background PA is
continuously dying and restarting.

The bug was fixed in this commit[1]: the asserts triggering the
situation are removed there. The commit is present from version 5.99.1
onwards (the github interface shows the tags where the commit is
included).

The commit message links to this bug in FO bugzilla[2]. The source of
the bug, according to that, is the supported rate reported by the kernel
module snd-pcsp to PA.

Now, as I see, there are two solutions to this bug. The obvious is to
use pulseaudio 6.0. But what I have done is to compile my kernel without
snd-pcsp module. The reason is the Kconfig help message:

     CONFIG_SND_PCSP:

      If you don't have a sound card in your computer, you can include a
      driver for the PC speaker which allows it to act like a primitive
      sound card.
      This driver also replaces the pcspkr driver for beeps.

      You can compile this as a module which will be called snd-pcsp.

      WARNING: if you already have a soundcard, enabling this
      driver may lead to a problem. Namely, it may get loaded
      before the other sound driver of yours, making the
      pc-speaker a default sound device. Which is likely not
      what you want. To make this driver play nicely with other
      sound driver, you can add this in a configuration file under
      /etc/modprobe.d/ directory:
      options snd-pcsp index=2

      You don't need this driver if you only want your pc-speaker to beep.
      You don't need this driver if you have a tablet piezo beeper
      in your PC instead of the real speaker.

      Say N if you have a sound card.
      Say M if you don't.
      Say Y only if you really know what you do.

Note that Debian standard kernels include this option by default.

Without CONFIG_SND_PCSP in the kernel, now pavucontrol and pulseaudio 5.0-13
are working.


[1]: https://github.com/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/42c814b9f320c5868fac98b4291265ca00e79fde
[2]: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48109

-- 
                       Saludos de Javier <jcantero at escomposlinux.org>


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