[LAU] How does PulseAudio start?

Ng Oon-Ee ngoonee at gmail.com
Tue Dec 15 10:14:01 EST 2009


Urgh, HTML mails...

On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 07:49 -0600, Jonathan E. Brickman wrote:
> Does Pulse always start as a daemon, or is it sometimes set up as a
> hal/udev item, or something else?

Pulseaudio runs as a per-user daemon, if run correctly. This is the same
as JACK. It can ALSO be run in 'system-wide' mode but this is not
encouraged by the devs for security and efficiency issues.

> The goal is to have Jack always run, to have Pulse be the default
> non-Jack audio API, to have the .asoundrc send user-level ALSA
> requests to Pulse.  
> 
> This is working well in my current system load, except when I restart
> Jack; when I restart Jack, the following occurs:
>       * Pulse goes away as far as any apps are concerned, including
>         Jack and its own diagnostics; 
>       * the default Gnome volume control (set to point at Pulse
>         via .asoundrc) spontaneously goes away;

This is symptomatic of a pulseaudio crash.

>       * If I try /etc/init.d/pulseaudio restart, it says it is not
>         started;

Please DO NOT use /etc/init.d/pulseaudio, this points to system-wide
pulse. Start pulseaudio with a simple pulseaudio from the terminal or
the like (perhaps from the F2 prompt).

>       * if I try ps aux | grep pulse , it says that it is started.

Most distros have pulse set to autostart, so it would restart itself (as
per-user) after crashing if someone tries to access audio.

> In my previous load (AVLinux), all I had to do was start jackd
> in /etc/rc.local, tell Pulse to use Jack as its sink, and tell Pulse
> to daemonize via its own .conf file, and it did very well.  I have
> tried several methods, including setting Jack and Pulse at different
> runlevels, but when I try to use Jack as an /etc/init.d item the boot
> jack log says that I don't have permission to use realtime scheduling,
> and it doesn't run.
> 
> Help?
> 
> J.E.B.

This identical setup works for me. What versions do you have of
pulse/jack? Please dump jack1 and use jack2 if you want to work with
pulse, there's quite a few fixes (including, coincidentally, one which
fixes module-jack-sink/source in pulseaudio crashing the whole daemon).
Of course, you need a relatively recent pulse (.16 and newer?).

Oh, and I just noticed, please don't run JACK as root either (which is
what /etc/init.d does).




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