Hello.
We are implementing "floation desktops" here (there is an Xvnc server per
user running on an application server, and users are connecting from
different terminals).
To provide audio, we are trying to use pulseaudio:
- for each user session, a pulseaudio server is started on the application
server, that listens on a unix domain socket; PULSE_SERVER inside session
point to this socket
- on each terminal, a pulseaudio server is started that communicates with
local audio hardware
- when a user connects to his session from a terminal, session's pulseaudio
server is configured to forward audio to terminal's pulseaudio server
(using a script that communicates with session's pulseaudio server through
a command-line socket).
In this way, we get audio automatically forwarded to the terminal where
user connected, and users can go from one terminal to other and still have
their sound.
Now questions.
1. I was experiencing assertion failures in both 'terminal'-side
and 'application-server'-side pulseaudio servers. In particular:
- when pulseaudio server is starteed for SunRay terminal, and module-oss is
loaded with device=/tmp/SUNWut/dev/utaudio/utdsp-N (this is where SunRay
software puts it's audio device files), it gets assertion failure at
module-oss.c:177, which is:
...
if (memchunk == &u->silence)
assert(r % u->sample_size == 0);
else {
...
- when user starts mplayer within session, 'session-side' pulseaudio server
crashes at top of pa_memblockq_drop() on
assert(length % bq->base == 0);
I tried to comment out both asserts, and without those looks like
everything works.
However, I guess that asserts are there for a reason? What is a better fix?
2. When applications within session are playing short sounds, it sounds
like last very short fragment (0.1 sec or so) of eash sound is played at
the beginning of the next sound. Looks like somewhere a buffer is not
flushed at sound end, so data collected there is passed to audio hardware
when new sound if being played.
Any comments on this?
3. It will be very useful to implement completely transparent audio
migration, such that apps playing 'long' sounds will not notice that user
disconnected and then reconnected from other terminal, but will
transparantly continue playing.
