So, I finally managed to get PA up and running on my Ubuntu box, using the distributed packages. Took me awhile get get Alsa working and everything, but did manage to succeed. Got it set up on some remote boxes, and been having fun forwarding audio around my apartment. I've run into one problem though. PA supports moving a stream between sinks live, but only when those sinks exist within the same PA daemon. This is great for those... few cases where people have multiple sound cards. How many people have multiple, and care? Me, I have a lot of systems. I have one on my stereo, one on my desktop. Laptop over there. Another desktop. I want to forward live streams between different PA instances... and this got me thinking. Right now you have two real options, a per-user PA daemon and a per-system PA daemon. They both solve slightly different problems. I personally prefer the system wide PA daemon. It's obviously the only real way I can share my audio devices. I don't really understand why per-user is recommended. Still though, I can't move live streams between servers. So after thinking awhile, I came up with what might be a good configuration for this... perhaps the ideal configuration for the standard desktop. First, you have a "system" PA instance. It runs /etc/pulse/system.pa. It loads module-hal. Detects local devices. It's goal is to manage access to LOCAL devices. A single wrapper around them. In this PA instance one could enable zeroconf-publishing and tcp access and various ACLs. Second, you have a "user" PA instance. Each user who logs into the desktop gets one of these. It doesn't talk to hardware. It loads a module which detects all the local sources and sinks, by talking to the local PA daemon. It can also browse the network for zeroconf advertised sinks (ignoring the local ones if they are advertised.) What you have here then is one system instance and many user instances. Multiple users can login and access to the hardware can be multiplexed through the system PA. Clients would not be able to do advanced operations on the system PA unless they had certain rights. Can't move streams, etc. The user PA would be 100% under control of the user. He could move streams between it's sinks. This would mean he can make his local PA move a stream between the local system PA and a remote system PA. This is very nice. Policy gets applied at the appropiate places. As for zero-copy of data, not sure. I suspect the two PAs could communicate with shm still. This would be an ideal default desktop install and not require any configuration to achieve the desired result. What do you all think? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/attachments/20061217/e5b82178/attachment.pgp>
