Bugzilla – Bug 478511
openSUSE kernel claimed to be bad for pulseaudio
Last modified: 2009-06-04 16:32:25 UTC
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; it; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009012700 SUSE/3.0.6-0.1.2 Firefox/3.0.6 PulseAudio has been one of the major sources of complaints and of problems for both the 11.0 and 11.1 release, with significant annoyances for openSUSE users, as reported on IRC and on local forums. As a consequence it is worth to consider the possibility to disable it by default on freshly installed systems for openSUSE 11.2. This enhancement request aims to collect the votes of those who agree with this. According to a discussion in IRC with coolo, if there are enough requests, this might be done. So, please, if you want to see PA disabled by default, in favour of a working audio system out of the box for many more users, just comment here. Thanks, Alberto Reproducible: Always
+1
You should have a look at what Lennart says on pulseaudio-discuss list [1], 'cause this might be important for openSUSE. 1| https://tango.0pointer.de/pipermail/pulseaudio-discuss/2009-February/003150.html
On comment #2: that has nothing to do with this discussion. Please keep it on topic! Fedora, cited in the link as the distribution doing something in the suggested direction, has similar complaints to those we had for openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1. Bye, A.
+1 for me
+1 for me (no pulse audio of default in 11.2)
Guys, the bugzilla is no place for voting or discussions, and it's no user forum. It's the place to report a bug and fix the bug. Please vote/discuss on ML at first. Then report back the result to bugzilla as the consensus of the whole community. Thanks.
I do not see any discussion here. Enabling pa by default can be regarded as a bug and not doing so as an enhancement people vote on. Bugzilla is about bugs/enhancements (not features) and voting.
In answer to comment #7: This is an enhancement request, and bugzilla is exactly the place where this kind of discussion, to collect votes for it. Further discussion happened in the IRC anyway, and this bug report was opened as a consequence of it to collect user's feedback in a clean and organized manner, so that the decisionmaker can decide without reading an endless discussion in a mailing-list. As a consequence I reopen it. Regards, A.
@Takashi Iwai: You might want to take part to the IRC life of openSUSE and discuss with us. Any suggestion/help is welcome! :-)
Could you give the exact voting result here? (And, no I'm not going to join IRC just for this purpose.) The vote must be done in an open way, and needs to take from a wide range of voters (users) without bias. Voting in bugzilla doesn't make sense for this kind of issue because the bugzilla (a specific bug entry) isn't the place where every user takes a look. It's the place where the people with the same problems take a look. Thus, of course, it will result in votes just by haters. Also, the endless discussion in ML is the result you have to respect. If there is no clear sign in the discussions in ML, it means there is no clear way to go, too. The rest is the political decision, and not about technical ones (remember KDE vs GNOME). So, please give more concrete technical issues rather than emotional +1/-1 votes.
> So, please give more concrete technical issues rather than emotional +1/-1 votes. There's nothing emotional about it. > It's the place where the people with the same problems take a look. Thus, of course, it will result in votes just by haters. Which is exactly the point - this isn't an open "opinion poll" it's about messuring how big the disturbances/problems (->bug) with PA really is, and if it affects enough people it's worth thinking about disabling it by default.
Hi Takashi, the result of the voting, done with the usual procedure to vote bugs and requests, can be read at the top of the page. Currently this request has 27 votes. Each user can give a maximum of five votes. I probably wasn't clear in the initial post. We discussed to disable PA on IRC, and coolo suggested that is can be done if there is a sufficient number of requests. I don't know what "sufficient" means, but I thought it would have been easier to collect the votes in a quantitative manner here, using bugzilla features. I think it is important to notice that I'm not asking to remove PulseAudio, but to simply disable it by default, so that users don't meet the problems it is causing to them. PulseAudio can be already be disabled with one click in YaST, and the same can done to enable it again. My idea is that we should not activate it by default, because for 11.0 and 11.1 releases we had quite a lot of complaints due to it. Users who want it will be able to enable it with a simple click, but the new unexperienced user won't have to fight to make it work to listen to his music, which will result in a better image of the distribution that "works out of the box" and at the same time provides "the latest stack" for those who want/need it. The concrete technical issues are the following (I sum up what reported): - PA audio glitches often. - It gives troubles with Flash and other players, which capture the server, making other applications unable to work correctly. - It crashes, leaving you without controls on the audio system (Connection refused). - It doesn't work properly with some player and sound tool (someone reported issues with audacity, skype (I know it's skype problem but people wants to use it) gives problems too). Anyway, if you prefer, we can post the link on the ML to make it available to a wider public. I simply fear it will become noisy. I already spread it on IRC when I opened the request. P.S. My invitation on IRC was friendly. If you don't like it, there is no problem. But I'm serious when I say that suggestions are welcome. After all we are here to improve things, and not to fight between us :-) Regards, Alberto
+1 at least, under kde is unuseful.
OK, then I reassign this bug to coolo. Please reassign back after the decision is made. My position is neutral about this. I myself don't use PA, and I won't. But I do understand that some (other) people want PA as default, too.
no to pulseaudio by default in opensuse 11.2
This is discussion about this enhancement request: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2009-02/msg00208.html
FYI, opened a discussion here so the interested people can say their opinion and we can collect more feedback: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2009-02/msg00208.html A.
Stupid question, if people think that the votes on this bug can be taken into account for the decision: how can people vote to keep pulseaudio? IMHO, bugzilla is not the right place for this -- this is not an enhancement request, this is a technical decision. Starting a thread on opensuse-factory was a good thing, though :-)
for me alsa worked perfectly, so why change it.. so +1
Can we get kernel people look into the points raised in link posted on comment #2? https://tango.0pointer.de/pipermail/pulseaudio-discuss/2009-February/003150.html Quoting relevant parts from that post for everyone's benefit here. "Apparently OpenSUSE ships a kernel (2.6.27.7-9-pae) that causes scheduling latencies of > 210ms. That is a lot. That is really really really a lot." "Fedora-kernels that easily give latencies of 5ms or so." "1) For fucks sakes: get your bloody kernels fixed. Enable preempt, set HZ to 1000. Get rid of low-quality drivers that block the CPU. Latencies of 210ms is *REALLY NOT NECESSARY*. 2) If you want to stick with your crap kernel, then either disable g-f entirely or adjust the #defines at the top of src/modules/alsa-sink.c and src/modules/alsa-source.c." So why do our kernel suck so bad?
please do not make this a voting bug. We have openfate with voting functionality (It's feature 305888 now). But I want to sort out the claims our kernel does not work with pulseaudio. Making alsa work only for the !pulseaudio case is too little I'm afraid - no matter if we make it default or not.
feature 305694 (desktop kernel) might be the solution.
Coolo, please open another bug if it's only about the kernel latency. This bug entry already so contaminated with irrelevant issues, thus not appropriate to change the subject but still keep going... (Basically Lennart mixed up different latency issues. Any upstream kernel can be as bad as ours. But I won't comment any more in this bug entry.)
Please, put the number of the new bug somewhere :-) Btw, the glitches are one of the problems. I don't see how a kernel can fix the others brought by PA. Anyway, let's try and see! Bye, A.
Yep. Alberto, could you open another bug(s) regarding the better / easier way to disable PA on GNOME and KDE (maybe one for each)? It's rather a purely technical issue to fix / enhance. The initial problem of this bug was that its intention is about the "default" setup for all. This is way too big jump and could be considered as short-cut. But, please don't get me wrong -- I'm not against the action. We just have to go step by step. So, first, as an enhancement, give a way to disable PA more easily on GNOME and KDE so that people can work around the possible problems in future. It's also good for testing/debugging POV. The default thing can be decided later. When a "workaround" becomes a wider stream, it shall be the main stream. OTOH, if PA gets fixed and improved until then, we'll be happy, too. Thanks.
OK. I'll hunt for some good and experienced KDE user for the KDE part ^_^ When done, I'll post the bug numbers here. I agree the default can be decided later.
It does not need a vote to establish this bug's resolution. By the conservativity principle, what worked before must continue to work, and defaulting to a kernel whose configuration is incompatible with some software (PA) making the user experience a horrible one is the cause of this bug. So, pretty please?
I cannot agree in that conservative point with you. In this terms, you mean that Arts and OSS should be supported for a lifetime? And who does still use kernel 2.0? Things are going forward, and things come (if they er good) and go (if they er no longer needed). The same is with PulseAudio, it is new, and maybe it has issues at this time. But it has good a nice concept and is less complex than ALSA. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio - I really like and support it. The discussion with the kernel should rather lead to: What's the point in adapting this latency time? Any disadvantages, and if yes, any disadvantages for desktop users?
The discussion is moved to: https://features.opensuse.org/305888, and that is the reason this bug is closed as invalid. There is related discussion: https://features.opensuse.org/306412 Where I would give comments on all similar cases of new software.