At Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:41:11 -0800, Greg KH wrote:
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 10:55:08PM -0600, Alberto Passalacqua wrote:
But you are trying to push something out of the distro, with no replacement. That's not very constructive.
It's partly true. Before PulseAudio, whose functionalities are for many something of not use, we had a lot stabler audio system, especially on GNOME. At least you didn't need to restart a daemon everytime you close your browser with a flash animation to have audio controls working again, or you could keep a player open (not playing, simply open in pause) when someone called you on Skype. Currently this is not possible anymore. Skype is trying to implement PulseAudio support, but they are having problems (PA crashes).
Even if skype just writes to the "default" alsa interface it doesn't work? That would seem very strange. Especially as all new distros implement PA these days :)
How "default" PCM behaves is dependent upon the setup. On GNOME, the default is routed always over PA through alsa-lib pulse plugin. And, skype is known to be problematic with the pulse alsa-lib plugin. Since skype doesn't talk with PA directly, its communication route is: skype <-> alsa-lib (pulse plugin) <-> PA <-> alsa-lib (hw) <-> kernel You see how fragile it could be. On non-GNOME setup (not sure about KDE4, though), the "default" is the alsa-lib dmix. In most cases, it's exclusive with PA unless PA uses the dmix again. Thus, skype works, but only when you don't play something via PA. The problem of flash-player is a mixture of such scenarios. When libflashsupport package is installed (it is as default), the flash player tries to detect what backend to use. It prefers PA if running, otherwise takes alsa "default". Again, depending on the setup, the routing might be complicated or mis-detected. So, when PA is disabled, indeed the system shall work well like before. That's why the thread started. And, I'm also for an *option* to disable PA. HOWEVER: disabling it should be the last option. It shouldn't be taken as the primary option as the subject says. Actually the PA problems can be categorized to two regions: 1. audio quality issues 2. integration issues About 1, it comes more or less from "glitch-free" feature of PA (ironically). These are simply bugs to be fixed, not to hide. It's unfortunate that this feature was introduced to 11.1 before maturing. The second issue includes the third-vendor softwares like skype, and the issues about mixer applications. The mixer issues will (should) be improved in future. But the third-vendor issue isn't always easy to fix. But, we can expect that they are going to fix the codes if they see the wide deployment and the massive problem reports... Takashi -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org