Poettering: Rethinking PID 1 [LWN.net]

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted Apr 30, 2010 15:15 UTC (Fri) by sharms (guest, #57357) [Link] (15 responses)

He is in no way indebted to you, to my knowledge atleast, to continue work on Pulse Audio for any reason.

Where does your sense of entitlement come from?

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted Apr 30, 2010 15:31 UTC (Fri) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link] (13 responses)

Nice. I guess we'll see the next sound server in a few months. And the Linux audio mess continues.

</sarcasm>

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted Apr 30, 2010 15:56 UTC (Fri) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link] (12 responses)

Sarcasm aside, I trust Poettering in whatever he decides to do. He did awesome work with PulseAudio, and I'm sure it will continue to rock even if the creator dares to move on to other things. The secret is responsible project management.

But when you speak of "entitlement", all I hear is "ignoring all sense of responsibility". And that's not exactly a virtue of open source, what with all the dead projects in the Linux audio mess alone. PA has been the project to end all that madness.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 1, 2010 16:04 UTC (Sat) by sturmflut (subscriber, #38256) [Link] (11 responses)

> He did awesome work with PulseAudio
> PA has been the project to end all that madness

That's a joke, right? I've never seen PulseAudio working out of the box on any machine, it's usually the first package I remove after installation.

There is no "Linux Audio Madness", ALSA and the multimedia libraries have done a good job already long before Poettering even started working on PulseAudio.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 2, 2010 0:32 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (10 responses)

> I've never seen PulseAudio working out of the box on any machine, it's usually the first package I remove after installation.

That's comedy. It's called selection bias.

PulseAudio is working great for the vast majority of people on all current Linux distros. If you're one of the few people who's running a distro less than a year old and still seeing issues, I suggest filing some bugs.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 3, 2010 1:46 UTC (Mon) by waucka (guest, #63097) [Link] (9 responses)

I suspect that most "bugs in PulseAudio" actually boil down to "bugs in ALSA". For example, when people complain about weirdness when changing the volume, that is probably because PulseAudio is trying to make it consistent, but ALSA is lying about amplification levels.

Personally, I find that I need to install PulseAudio in order to make things work on my Kubuntu machines. I don't think I've had any sound-related problem in the past year that was caused by PulseAudio itself.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 3, 2010 11:31 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

For example, when people complain about weirdness when changing the volume, that is probably because PulseAudio is trying to make it consistent, but ALSA is lying about amplification levels.

As per a previous comment, "perfect is the enemy of good". A perfect but complex solution that has strange edge-cases and failure modes may be worse than a simpler solution that, though not being as auto-magic, consistently behaves in a way the user can understand.

KISS.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 11, 2010 23:57 UTC (Tue) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link]

The problem isn't that Pulse is complex, but that the underlying hardware is.

For example, I don't know about you, but I never managed to find a consistent "rule" on how to set my volume with max amplification without any clipping. Or to record analog with optimum levels. Do I set PCM to max, DRC range to 50%, Master to 70%, flip the gain switch? And it's different on every machine I own to boot.

Pulse with working alsa drivers is heaven. It's the first application that tries to do it right, so it's normal that all the underlying driver bugs are exposed too. If driver features haven't been used until now, they're by definition untested.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 5, 2010 14:23 UTC (Wed) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (6 responses)

One could easily solve the volume problem simply by keeping the volume at max and using digital volume controls everywhere. Coupled with some noise-shaped dithering the solution would work well.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 5, 2010 14:45 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (3 responses)

The trouble with that is that cheap hardware (the sort that often lies about dB levels) also tends to have poor quality analogue amplifiers, such that running at maximum volume gets you lots of audible noise. You therefore have to face a nasty conundrum: on the one hand, you want to keep the analogue volume as low as possible, to keep the analogue noise below the threshold of hearing. On the other hand, you need it high enough to get the volume level the user has requested.

This all leads to pain - PulseAudio's solution is as good as you're going to get, and once the bugs are out of ALSA, it'll work fine. In the meantime, bugsquashing needs to be done :(

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 7, 2010 1:06 UTC (Fri) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (2 responses)

Here's an idea: if pulse wouldn't want to adjust the analog mixer settings, a knowledgeable user could select the optimal setting for his setup and then maybe flame somebody (distributor?) for having provided poor defaults.

I had personally some annoyance with pulse's tendency to force a particular mixer state each time it started, and unfortunately it disabled digital output for applications that did not talk through pulse, and thus I lost sound for a number of applications.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 7, 2010 7:18 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

This "optimal" setting you talk about doesn't exist. On my el-cheapo card, I want it to be consistently as low as possible without being so low that I can't reach the volume I want. This means about 25% for normal desktop sounds, about 30% when playing games, and about 50% when playing movies.

With Pulse's auto-adjusting going on, this Just Works. Without the auto-adjust, I would constantly be playing with the volume controls to make it happen.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 7, 2010 14:09 UTC (Fri) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

Oh well. The problem specifically was that this magic approach of trying to adjust every possible mixer didn't really work for many people, who discovered that volume levels jumped up and down inconsistently. But I suppose at least you are happy. I just wish Pulse hadn't attempted that, feels too clever by half.

Still, in the future new drivers will probably be tested with the pulse's requirements in mind and thus all the pain is temporary, right?

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 6, 2010 1:43 UTC (Thu) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, that is a bad idea. On most internal cards setting the volume level to high will trigger clipping since volume adjustments are done digitally by the hardware. And on most USB speakers you'd set the built-in amplifier to max, which isn't a good idea either.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 7, 2010 1:01 UTC (Fri) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

Okay, let me amend the "max" to "maximum level known to not clip yet". It just thought that it would be simpler to find some fixed set of control states for each sound hardware which gives its "optimal" output, and then do everything else in software.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted Apr 30, 2010 16:19 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

How should one get PA developers to be in one's debt?

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted Apr 30, 2010 15:23 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

Well it must be, because I'm sure you've contributed patches for all the issues you've found, right?

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted Apr 30, 2010 16:38 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] (1 responses)

Perhaps the FAQ will be of help here:

"Is this a Red Hat project?
No, this is my personal side project. Also, let me emphasize this: the opinions reflected here are my own. They are not the views of my employer, or Ronald McDonald, or anyone else."

It strikes me that this implies that his day job is PA (a posting on the other recent pulse thread here on LWN said as much, offering it as an explanation of why Linux is the premiere platform for PA) and he hacks on systemd on the side.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 1, 2010 21:55 UTC (Sat) by Sho (subscriber, #8956) [Link]

Out of curiosity, got a link to that thread?

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted Apr 30, 2010 19:37 UTC (Fri) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link]

How did you get that???

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 6, 2010 1:41 UTC (Thu) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link] (1 responses)

No, it isn't. Did I say it was? Did I say I was leaving PA development? No and No. The day I published the systemd blog story I travelled to the Linux Audio Conference. RH pays me for PA work. What can you read from that?

And anyway, since when do you get to complain how my work priorities are set?

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted May 6, 2010 7:28 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Well, to be fair, your code does affect the desktop experience of most Linux users. And there doesn't appear to be any way for such desktop users to pay your employer for support on this software...