Notes from the PulseAudio Mini Summit 2014

The third week of October was quite action-packed, with a whole bunch of conferences happening in Düsseldorf. The Linux audio developer community as well as the PulseAudio developers each had a whole day of discussions related to a wide range of topics. I’ll be summarising the events of the PulseAudio mini summit day here. The discussion was split into two parts, the first half of the day with just the current core developers and the latter half with members of the community participating as well.

I’d like to thank the Linux Foundation for sparing us a room to carry out these discussions — it’s fantastic that we are able to colocate such meetings with a bunch of other conferences, making it much easier than it would otherwise be for all of us to converge to a single place, hash out ideas, and generally have a good time in real life as well!

With a whole day of discussions, this is clearly going to be a long post, so you might want to grab a coffee now. :)

Release plan

We have a few blockers for 6.0, and some pending patches to merge (mainly HSP support). Once this is done, we can proceed to our standard freeze → release candidate → stable process.

Build simplification for BlueZ HFP/HSP backends

For simplifying packaging, it would be nice to be able to build all the available BlueZ module backends in one shot. There wasn’t much opposition to this idea, and David (Henningsson) said he might look at this. (as I update this before posting, he already has)

srbchannel plans

We briefly discussed plans around the recently introduced shared ringbuffer channel code for communication between PulseAudio clients and the server. We talked about the performance benefits, and future plans such as direct communication between the client and server-side I/O threads.

Routing framework patches

Tanu (Kaskinen) has a long-standing set of patches to add a generic routing framework to PulseAudio, developed by notably Jaska Uimonen, Janos Kovacs, and other members of the Tizen IVI team. This work adds a set of new concepts that we’ve not been entirely comfortable merging into the core. To unblock these patches, it was agreed that doing this work in a module and using a protocol extension API would be more beneficial. (Tanu later did a demo of the CLI extensions that have been made for the new routing concepts)

module-device-manager

As a consequence of the discussion around the routing framework, David mentioned that he’d like to take forward Colin’s priority list work in the mean time. Based on our discussions, it looked like it would be possible to extend module-device-manager to make it port aware and get the kind functionality we want (the ability to have a priority-order list of devices). David was to look into this.

Module writing infrastructure

Relatedly, we discussed the need to export the PA internal headers to allow externally built modules. We agreed that this would be okay to have if it was made abundantly clear that this API would have absolutely no stability guarantees, and is mostly meant to simplify packaging for specialised distributions.

Which led us to the other bit of infrastructure required to write modules more easily — making our protocol extension mechanism more generic. Currently, we have a static list of protocol extensions in our core. Changing this requires exposing our pa_tagstruct structure as public API, which we haven’t done. If we don’t want to do that, then we would expose a generic “throw this blob across the protocol” mechanism and leave it to the module/library to take care of marshalling/unmarshalling.

Resampler quality evaluation

Alexander shared a number of his findings about resampler quality on PulseAudio, vs. those found on Windows and Mac OS. Some questions were asked about other parameters, such as relative CPU consumption, etc. There was also some discussion on how to try to carry this work to a conclusion, but no clear answer emerged.

It was also agreed on the basis of this work that support for libsamplerate and ffmpeg could be phased out after deprecation.

Addition of a “hi-fi” mode

The discussion came around to the possibility of having a mode where (if the hardware supports it), PulseAudio just plays out samples without resampling, conversion, etc. This has been brought up in the past for “audiophile” use cases where the card supports 88.2/96 kHZ and higher sample rates.

No objections were raised to having such a mode — I’d like to take this up at some point of time.

LFE channel module

Alexander has some code for filtering low frequencies for the LFE channel, currently as a virtual sink, that could eventually be integrated into the core.

rtkit

David raised a question about the current status of rtkit and whether it needs to exist, and if so, where. Lennart brought up the fact that rtkit currently does not work on systemd+cgroups based setups (I don’t seem to have why in my notes, and I don’t recall off the top of my head).

The conclusion of the discussion was that some alternate policy method for deciding RT privileges, possibly within systemd, would be needed, but for now rtkit should be used (and fixed!)

kdbus/memfd

Discussions came up about the possibility of using kdbus and/or memfd for the PulseAudio transport. This is interesting to me, there doesn’t seem to be an immediately clear benefit over our SHM mechanism in terms of performance, and some work to evaluate how this could be used, and what the benefit would be, needs to be done.

ALSA controls spanning multiple outputs

David has now submitted patches for controls that affect multiple outputs (such as “Headphone+LO”). These are currently being discussed.

Audio groups

Tanu would like to add code to support collecting audio streams into “audio groups” to apply collective policy to them. I am supposed to help review this, and Colin mentioned that module-stream-restore already uses similar concepts.

Stream and device objects

Tanu proposed the addition of new objects to represent streams and objects. There didn’t seem to be consensus on adding these, but there was agreement of a clear need to consolidate common code from sink-input/source-output and sink/source implementations. The idea was that having a common parent object for each pair might be one way to do this. I volunteered to help with this if someone’s taking it up.

Filter sinks

Alexander brough up the need for a filter API in PulseAudio, and this is something I really would like to have. I am supposed to sketch out an API (though implementing this is non-trivial and will likely take time).

Dynamic PCM for HDMI

David plans to see if we can use profile availability to help determine when an HDMI device is actually available.

Browser volumes

The usability of flat-volumes for browser use cases (where the volume of streams can be controlled programmatically) was discussed, and my patch to allow optional opt-out by a stream from participating in flat volumes came up. Tanu and I are to continue the discussion already on the mailing list to come up with a solution for this.

Handling bad rewinding code

Alexander raised concerns about the quality of rewinding code in some of our filter modules. The agreement was that we needed better documentation on handling rewinds, including how to explicitly not allow rewinds in a sink. The example virtual sink/source code also needs to be adjusted accordingly.

BlueZ native backend

Wim Taymans’ work on adding back HSP support to PulseAudio came up. Since the meeting, I’ve reviewed and merged this code with the change we want. Speaking to Luiz Augusto von Dentz from the BlueZ side, something we should also be able to add back is for PulseAudio to act as an HSP headset (using the same approach as for HSP gateway support).

Containers and PA

Takashi Iwai raised a question about what a good way to run PA in a container was. The suggestion was that a tunnel sink would likely be the best approach.

Common ALSA configuration

Based on discussion from the previous day at the Linux Audio mini-summit, I’m supposed to look at the possibility of consolidating the various mixer configuration formats we currently have to deal with (primarily UCM and its implementations, and Android’s XML format).

(thanks to Tanu, David and Peter for reviewing this)