Incomplete sound device detection in PulseAudio with alsa-lib 1.2.5

[foutrelis]

(Copying my comments over from #142 since it appears to be a different issue to that one. Sorry for the noise there!)

After upgrading to alsa-lib 1.2.5 Chromium stopped playing audio until pulseaudio was restarted. Upon closer inspection, pactl list cards is now missing the HDA Intel HDMI card and only shows the HDA Intel PCH one.

Some error messages I've gathered:

• After upgrading to alsa-lib and before restarting pulseaudio, attempting to play a video in Chromium would result in: pulseaudio[625]: Error opening PCM device front:0: Invalid argument

• Restarting pulseaudio with alsa-lib 1.2.5 installed logs the following to the journal:

  pulseaudio[66345]: Failed to find a working profile.
  pulseaudio[66345]: Failed to load module "module-alsa-card" (argument: "device_id="1" name="pci-0000_00_03.0"
  card_name="alsa_card.pci-0000_00_03.0" namereg_fail=false tsched=yes fixed_latency_range=no ignore_dB=no
  deferred_volume=yes use_ucm=yes avoid_resampling=no card_properties="module-udev-detect.discovered=1""):
  initialization failed.

Git bisect points to commit 63f7745be504e447923f2cde421177a2fca99340 as the first commit that results in the Failed to find a working profile error.

After restarting pulseaudio with alsa-lib 1.2.5 installed, it appears that pactl list cards shows one fewer cards on my laptop which has this audio hardware:

$ lspci | grep Audio
00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller (rev 0b)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series HD Audio Controller (rev 04)

alsa-lib-1.2.4-pactl-list-cards.txt alsa-lib-1.2.5-pactl-list-cards.txt

pulseaudio -v output:

pulseaudio-verbose.txt

[perexg]

I found the issue. Here's a quick fix (this config file is included multiple times, so it's required to clean the updated tree to avoid merging of arrays):

# diff -u /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf~ /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf
--- /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf~   2021-05-31 12:29:51.000000000 +0200
+++ /usr/share/alsa/cards/HDA-Intel.conf    2021-06-01 21:01:13.347658405 +0200
@@ -4,6 +4,8 @@

 <confdir:pcm/front.conf>

+!HDA-Intel {}
+
 HDA-Intel.pcm.front.0 {
    @args [ CARD ]
    @args.CARD {

I am evaluating other solutions, too.

EDIT: Other cards with this legacy config have the similar issue. I know that.

[perexg]

Fixed in the above commit without the requirement to modify the driver specific configuration files.

[foutrelis]

Hi @perexg, thank you for looking into this issue!

pactl list cards is now missing the HDA Intel HDMI card and only shows the HDA Intel PCH one.

This is now fixed.

After upgrading to alsa-lib and before restarting pulseaudio, attempting to play a video in Chromium would result in: pulseaudio[625]: Error opening PCM device front:0: Invalid argument

This is still happening, preventing a smooth upgrade from 1.2.4 to 1.2.5 without having to restart pulseaudio.

[perexg]

After upgrading to alsa-lib and before restarting pulseaudio, attempting to play a video in Chromium would result in: pulseaudio[625]: Error opening PCM device front:0: Invalid argument

This is still happening, preventing a smooth upgrade from 1.2.4 to 1.2.5 without having to restart pulseaudio.

Unfortunately, the config is not backward compatible, so the older alsa-lib (which pulseaudio uses until restarted) cannot handle it.

[foutrelis]

After upgrading to alsa-lib and before restarting pulseaudio, attempting to play a video in Chromium would result in: pulseaudio[625]: Error opening PCM device front:0: Invalid argument

This is still happening, preventing a smooth upgrade from 1.2.4 to 1.2.5 without having to restart pulseaudio.

Unfortunately, the config is not backward compatible, so the older alsa-lib (which pulseaudio uses until restarted) cannot handle it.

Ah, that's all right. We'll add a post installation note about it in Arch.

FWIW, I'm attaching pulseaudio -v output after upgrading alsa-lib to 1.2.5 (with this patch) without restarting PA and attempting to play an audio file in mpv. These lines stood out to me:

I: [alsa-sink-ALC3227 Analog] (alsa-lib)dlmisc.c: unable to verify version for symbol snd_func_private_integer
I: [alsa-sink-ALC3227 Analog] (alsa-lib)conf.c: symbol snd_func_private_integer is not defined inside (null)

Based on what you said, it does appear that the older libasound loaded by pulseaudio can't find the newly-added snd_func_private_integer symbol within itself (which is referenced in the config as private_integer).

I appreciate the explanation and quick fix of the device detection issue. Thanks again! 🦔

alsa-lib-upgrade-without-pulseaudio-restart.txt

[iiv3]

Would you please release alsa-lib-1.2.5.1 containing this fix?

Without this fix even native alsa programs fail to work...