pulseaudio is not restarted automatically if it crashes or is terminated

Under phosh on the PinePhone, pulseaudio is not restarted automatically if it ever crashes or is terminated. To try, do the following:

1. Launch phosh desktop
2. Type "killall pulseaudio" in terminal and press enter
3. Open file browser and open up any audio file

Expected result would be that audio works/recovers, but it never does and you'll just get silence.

This lack of restartable pulseaudio is especially a problem since on the PinePhone at least, pulseaudio tends to crash and once I had to terminate it because it maxed out one core with zero audio playback going on in idle. So addressing this would help a lot with the impact of when pulseaudio does actually malfunction.

changed the description

By Ellie on 2020-07-24T13:36:23

Interesting. On my KDE Plasma laptop with Arch Linux doing either pulseaudio -k or killall pulseaudio restarts pulseaudio very quickly and resumes playback of anything that's running.

$ systemctl --user status pulseaudio.service
● pulseaudio.service - Sound Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Fri 2020-07-24 18:40:37 CEST; 1min 10s ago
TriggeredBy: ● pulseaudio.socket
   Main PID: 17466 (pulseaudio)
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/pulseaudio.service
             ├─17466 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no
             └─17471 /usr/lib/pulse/gsettings-helper

Jul 24 18:40:36 g550jk systemd[1150]: Starting Sound Service...
Jul 24 18:40:37 g550jk systemd[1150]: Started Sound Service.

I'm guessing stuff is still sending data to the socket (pulseaudio.socket) and because of that it restarts the service? pulseaudio.socket listens on /run/user/1000/pulse/native for me

So I'm guessing systemd is responsible for restarting pulseaudio in case it crashes here?

By Luca Weiss on 2020-07-24T16:43:34

@z3ntu good question, I assumed this is somehow a feature of the pulse client library to relaunch it but I have no idea. Whatever it is, under phosh that part doesn't seem to work right

By Ellie on 2020-07-26T12:26:29

This works for me on my KDE Plasma desktop on bare Alpine Linux btw (so not a systemd feature).

By Bart Ribbers on 2020-07-27T15:19:22

mentioned in issue #712 (closed)

By Ellie on 2020-08-11T12:35:35

changed title from pulseaudio can't be restarted if it ever crashes or is terminated to pulseaudio is not restarted automatically if it crashes or is terminated

By Antoine Fontaine on 2020-08-13T04:13:11

changed the description

By Antoine Fontaine on 2020-08-13T04:13:11

closed