Debian debates systemd

Posted Jul 31, 2011 0:24 UTC (Sun) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446)
In reply to: Debian debates systemd by sbergman27
Parent article: Debian debates systemd

What the hell has PulseAudio got to do with systemd?

I'll digress:

I run Gentoo on everything I have. I don't run PulseAudio on anything, whatever that is. I don't think its an OS and I'm pretty sure I can ignore it if I don't want it.

I do have to start and stop services on my systems and it would be nice if I could do that with some certainty as to their behaviour. Now Gentoo does things quite similarly to the SysV Init way, which is crap. You tell the service to stop and for some reason it doesn't but the system thinks it has. Then I get to play with ps and then kill or killall. This wastes my time.

Now, systemd can guarantee that a service has stopped by using the kernel interface by dropping the cgroup. It does things the right way.

There are quite a few other aspects of systemd that are quite useful.

As a sysadmin of quite a few systems, systemd is looking like a good idea.

Cheers
Jon

PS L Poetering does come across as a bit of a wanker but you cant fault systemd for that.

Debian debates systemd

Posted Jul 31, 2011 1:55 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (8 responses)

"What the hell has PulseAudio got to do with systemd?"

Everything. Years after its initial debut, I still have to kill PA and restart it on both desktop machines and my netbook something like twice a day. (No. I'm not exagerating.) It goes into a mode where everything sounds like alien flute tunes. Every 6 months, I encounter another set of PA problems. Not a huge deal since it's simply a sound issue. But it says something about the author/maintainer. I certainly would never want to trust my customers' servers to Lennart's idea of software quality. The guy has an attitude problem, and it shows up, clearly, in his work.

Debian debates systemd

Posted Aug 1, 2011 8:48 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (7 responses)

Hm. It looks like your drivers are crap.

I've been running PulseAudio on tens of different devices without any problem at all for a couple of years now.

Debian debates systemd

Posted Aug 1, 2011 16:38 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (6 responses)

Right. All my machines for the last several years have had crap drivers. If that's the case, what does it say about Linux?

Odd thing, though. If I disable PA completely and replace it with esd, all those problems magically disappear.

Debian debates systemd

Posted Aug 1, 2011 16:41 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

It says that sound drivers are crap.

And I really find it hard to believe that it all magically works with ESD without having a lot of fun with ALSA config files.

Debian debates systemd

Posted Aug 1, 2011 17:50 UTC (Mon) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (1 responses)

The difference being that once you have an ALSA configuration working, it stays working. Whereas in my sad experience pulseaudio's configuration only stays working until the next suspend/resume or reboot or phase of the moon. For USB sound, chances are about 50/50 that after a resume pulseaudio will refuse to admit the device still exists. The only reliable fix I've found for this is to blow away ~/.pulse and restart from scratch. Now maybe there is a configuration option that I've failed to find - one that says "pin this device across suspend/resume; even if you don't see it immediately, it _will_ come back." If so, I may be falsely blaming the implementation when it is more correctly a documentation failure.

Debian debates systemd

Posted Aug 1, 2011 19:07 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Not so. I've had persistent problems with ALSA (and OSS) before the PA.

Your USB issue seems to be related to your USB devices. I have a USB camera/microphone and they work just fine.

May be you should file bugs?

Debian debates systemd

Posted Aug 2, 2011 2:34 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

Perhaps, but at least it says that Linux device drivers aren't the same as Windows device drivers, leading to bugs in the hardware getting exposed to Linux and not Windows. See also mjg59's stuff on the importance of Doing It Like Windows.

Debian debates systemd

Posted Aug 4, 2011 21:25 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] (1 responses)

ESD? Shudder. When they finally abandoned it, it still had battery eating daemon/lib error-handling/busyloop bug(s). KDE's sound daemon wasn't any better in the bugginess department. And I think these bugs were in the daemons themselves, not in the audio drivers.

Debian debates systemd

Posted Aug 8, 2011 10:51 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>ESD? Shudder. When they finally abandoned it, it still had battery eating daemon/lib error-handling/busyloop bug(s).

Battery-eating isn't the end of the world - especially back when ESD was written since we didn't have all the CPU power states we do now, and hardly anyone had a laptop, so it didn't end up making much difference. The real problem with ESD was the randomly high latency and the fact that it was buggy and unstable.

That said, even today it's the only reliable-ish method of forwarding sound from a Linux machine to a Windows machine. Fortunately it looks like some brave soul has been working on getting PA running on Windows, so maybe within a year or two this crawling horror can finally be put to rest.