#828: Flash causes PA to get into broken state; affects other apps -----------------------+---------------------------------------------------- Reporter: lukehutch | Owner: lennart Type: defect | Status: new Milestone: | Component: daemon Keywords: | -----------------------+---------------------------------------------------- Ever since PulseAudio has been the default in Fedora, I have experienced the following bug:
If I leave browser tabs open for long periods of time that contain Flash animations, eventually PulseAudio stops working. Non-browser apps are also unable to play sound. the PA daemon still appears to be running. However to get the sound back you have to do pulseaudio -k and then restart pulseaudio, *and* you have to kill the browser. Just killing pulseaudio and restarting it while the browser is still running does not restore the ability of non-browser apps to access audio functions. Also during the time that the audio functionality is broken, trying to play through Alsa is also broken. Occasionally (one time in 5-10 or so), killing PA, killing the browser, and restarting PA does not fix the audio system, and the only way to get back audio playback is restarting the machine. I don't know what's wrong or how to reset the sound system short of killing PA and restarting it. Since the point at which PulseAudio actually breaks is very hard to pin down, I don't know how to reproduce, other than leaving the browser running for long periods of time with Flash-containing tabs open. I don't have a reliable trigger, even though it happens *all* *the* *time*, every day or two, and has done with that frequency ever since PA became the Fedora default, making this a very annoying and persistent bug. I thought this bug would have been found and fixed by now, because it is so common for me, and affects sound playback on three different systems I use or have used, across all versions of Fedora that have employed PA. I have seen a large number of similar bug reports online. However I didn't try to report it until now because (1) I don't have good reproducibility criteria, and (2) I have read numerous comments from Lennart in various places since PA was first created about how if things were broken, it is the apps that needed fixing, not PulseAudio. Trusting this, and reading about the awful hackery that is Flash's audio support, I have waited and watched across different versions of Flash as they went to libflash_support and switched audio mechanisms a couple of different times -- hoping that the bug would be fixed. But a few years later it still persists. But now that I think about it, even if Flash is broken, should it be able to pull down audio for the entire machine? This bug report is not meant to be a troll or flame, I just really want my audio to not break -- and even if it breaks for Flash, I don't want Flash to be able to pull down my entire audio stack for all apps. I am 100% willing to help debug this, if you can please point me in the right direction. What do I need to do to gather the appropriate debug info? -- Ticket URL: <http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/828> PulseAudio <http://pulseaudio.org/> The PulseAudio Sound Server _______________________________________________ pulseaudio-tickets mailing list pulseaudio-tickets@mail.0pointer.de https://tango.0pointer.de/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-tickets