[Openal-devel] Issues with openal-soft 1.9.563 using pulse

[Chris Robinson]

On Thursday 15 October 2009 5:50:40 pm Andres Mejia wrote:
> There are some issues that occur when using pulse as the backend driver for
> openal. For one, an application using openal will either hang (in the case
>  of mplayer) or will not have any sound (in the case of warzone2100 and
>  supertuxkart).
> 
> This message appears in the terminal for each application.
> AL lib: pulseaudio.c:370: tlength (14544) is not a multiple of minreq
>  (4096)!

That message is currently harmless, though it is a less than optimal response 
(the total buffer size isn't a multiple of the period/update size).

> Second issue is mainly with mplayer. Aside from mplayer hanging, mplayer
>  also always exits with this message.
> Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-close.c: 719: _dl_close: Assertion
>  `map->l_init_called' failed!
> 
> Setting openal to not use pulse will not give these issues.

Can't say I've seen this, though. Unfortunately, the PulseAudio backend is not 
that well tested.. I don't use Pulse, and I can't leave it installed because 
it interferes with normal playback (in particular, KDE4 likes auto-starting 
it, which makes it disable my default dmix device until I restart KDE, at 
which point it tries to restart Pulse again, etc). And it doesn't seem to work 
correctly even when it is installed.

If anyone else can test and fix it, though, I'll gladly accept patches. But as 
it is, I can't see anything wrong. The last test I was able to do showed that 
Pulse simply wasn't calling the write callback even though everything looked 
to be set up as it should.