[lug] Help with window manager "lockups"

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 14:58 -0600, Zan Lynx wrote:
> I've heard of rather serious bugs in eSound and PulseAudio on FC9
> causing this sort of problem.  Apparently if a program tries to play a
> sound and the pulseaudio server is not working, it goes into an infinite
> loop, freezing whatever application tried to make noise.

This sounds like a good candidate for the problem.  I have application
sounds disabled on the desktop but I suppose one of the apps could still
be trying to play a sound.  

Is there a way to remove pulseaudio from F9 without breaking things?
Will I still have Alsa/dmix instead?  I'm not a big audio guy so other
than making sure alsa is installed I haven't done much with it.  It just
always worked before.

> You should be able to see if this is the problem by using SSH to log
> into the FC9 machine or switching to a text terminal, then do "ps xa" to
> find the metacity process, then "strace -p [metacity-pid]".  If you see
> it spamming write and SIGPIPE, this is the problem.

Excellent.  I love it when there is something to see that *shows* the
problem.  At least that should tell me if pulseaudio is the culprit.
FYI, I switched to XFce on this box so I assume I should see the same
thing with xfwm4.

> I manually applied a patch to fix mine.  The patch makes esound break
> out of the loop when it gets SIGPIPE.

I'm not motivated enough to patch audio files if I can just get rid of
the thing.  While I use audio on this box (I listen to movies while I
work) I don't really care about the quality of the audio all that much.

> This patch is against esound 0.2.39:
> --- esound-0.2.39/esdlib.c	2008-07-15 09:35:15.000000000 -0600
> +++ /tmp/esdlib.c	2008-08-17 09:45:31.664488091 -0600
> @@ -152,6 +152,8 @@
>  		
>  		if (n > 0)
>  			nwritten += n;
> +		else
> +			break;
>  	} while (nwritten < buflen);
>  	
>  	fcntl (fd, F_SETFL, flags);

Wow.  Did you submit this patch?  If the bug is this simple they should
have patched and released a fix immediately.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Principal Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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