Bug#839993: pulseaudio: Pulseaudio is able to share non-ALSA audio devices across differens user sessions

[Felipe Sateler]

Control: tags -1 confirmed upstream
Control: forwarded -1 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98144

On 7 October 2016 at 05:02, Alexander Betaev <betaev at gmail.com> wrote:
> Package: pulseaudio
> Version: 9.0-3
> Severity: important
>
> Dear Maintainer,
>
> I found that Pulseaudio in per user session mode does not allow all users to
> use all devices I have on my machine.
> Only ALSA devices may be shared across different user sessions without an
> issue.
>
> I noticed such behaviour with native TCP device which is provided by my media
> center (JIC, also runs Stretch under KVM with GFX passthrough), and with
> Bluetooth device which works pretty well until you try to use it under another
> user.
>
> In order to achieve working Bluetooth Headset I had to disable pulseaudio for
> GDM3 user (Debian-gdm) because it grab it before my user almost each time.
>
> I believe there should be a hook which suspends pulseaudio when user looses
> focus on his/her session and a hook to restore when user grabs session focus.
>
> The only way to use pulseaudio in multi-user installations now is to make it
> system-wide which is also not recommended because of other issues
> (https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/WhatIsWrongWithSystemWide/)

I discussed this with upstream and they agree that this is only
implemented for alsa devices. I have thus created an issue upstream,
and am marking this bug as forwarded there. I have mainly focused in
the bluetooth case since that is the most likely to cause problems for
users.

-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler