[Jack-Devel] jackd start/stop

[Chris Caudle]

On Fri, December 14, 2018 2:11 am, liebrecht at grossmann-venter.com wrote:
> jackd is not a service as I tried to stop and start it with
> service jackd stop/start and it reports no such service

Correct, it is a userspace application that needs to be started under your
user account.  Applications using jackd for routing have to be able to
share a memory buffer, so you cannot for example run jackd as a system
service that any or multiple users could use.

> Therefore it seems the only way to stop jackd is with
> kill -9 <pid>

If you start from a command line you can use control-c key combination. 
Often users start from the qjackcontrol application, the application has a
"stop" button which can be used to stop jackd.  I also have my
qjackcontrol set to run "killall jackd" on exiting just in case the jackd
process hung for some reason and did not respond to control commands, but
I have not actually seen that happen, it is just a precaution.

Look in your applications directory, probably /usr/bin on most
distributions, might be in /bin on some.
There should be several apps with jack in the name.  These could be useful
to you:
/usr/bin/jack_connect
/usr/bin/jack_control
/usr/bin/jack_disconnect
/usr/bin/jack_lsp
/usr/bin/jack_samplerate
/usr/bin/jack_server_control


> That would be fine, but there is no such process jackd when i do ps.
> # ps -A |grep -i jack
>   2905 ?        00:01:02 jackdbus
>
> There is is only jackdbus which must be something else.

There are two variants of what is called version 2 of jackd, stand alone
jackd and jackdbus, which is jackd which exposes dbus controls.  For
various historical reasons what I called version 2 of jackd is not really
a continuation of version 1, it is another implementation of the same
userspace API with a completely different engine.  It started as an
experiment to try out some different features, but jackd 1 and jackd 2
ended up continuing in parallel, with slightly different internal
features, but same API presented to applications.  Since you have jackdbus
on your system that indicates your distribution ships jackd 2.

The jackdbus application is started using dbus, if you attempt to start it
manually it gives a warning:
jackdbus should be auto-executed by D-Bus message bus daemon.
If you want to run it manually anyway, specify "auto" as only parameter

Probably some application automatically started jackdbus when you started
the application. Hard to know which one that would have been.

> I can see that ardour/mixbus calls jackd with parameters at startup, but
> if I manually try to start jackd it says it is already running .... but
> it has no PID. So is it a runaway process on my system.

More probably jackd detects that there is already a process providing jack
API services, in your case jackdbus.  Use jack_control to query the
parameters, stop, etc.

> jack disappears often and I have to reboot to get it back

You do not really have to reboot, if your system is configured to use
jackdbus then just start an application which needs jackd and it will be
automatically started, or use jack_control start to start it manually.

Which distribution are you using?  You should be able to configure your
system to use jackd instead of jackdbus.  If you manually start jackd from
a terminal before starting any audio applications then jackdbus should
detect that another jackd server is running and not start, but you can
probably configure the audio applications to start jackd instead of
jackdbus if you would prefer.

Can you check what is in the ~/.jackdrc file?
(by the way, not sure how familiar you are with linux terminal use, just
reply if something is unclear, e.g. "~" means your user home directory).
Possibly either that file, or a system file in /etc/jackdrc is configured
to use jackdbus as the default jack server.  My drc file has this for
example:
/usr/bin/jackd -P70 -t2000 -dalsa -dhw:Lambda -r48000 -p1024 -n3 -zt -I376
-O376

That indicates to applications that want to automatically start a jack
server that my preference is jackd (instead of jackdbus), 2000 millisecond
timeout for applications to respond, ALSA driver backend, my Lambda audio
interface, 48k sample rate, 1024 samples per period, 3 periods buffering
latency, use triangular PDF dither, and report 376 samples of input and
output latency.
You do not have to set all of those backend parameters, you may be able to
get away with defaults for some.

I doubt you will care about the differences between jackd and jackdbus
though after finding jack_control, it sounds like you just have not
experimented enough to find all the various jack application yet. 
Admittedly they are not documented very well.  I'm not sure jackdbus is
documented anywhere in an easy to find form, the jack website just has man
pages for jackd, which has probably contributed to your confusion:
https://github.com/jackaudio/jackaudio.github.com/wiki/jackd(1)
https://github.com/jackaudio/jackaudio.github.com/wiki/jackdrc%285%29

The jack_control wiki page is probably the only place that mentions jackdbus:
https://github.com/jackaudio/jackaudio.github.com/wiki/WalkThrough_User_jack_control

-- 
Chris Caudle