Repeatedly tries to open and close ALSA devices in background forever, causing disk to fill up with errors

[miiichael]

Expected behaviour

To not run out of diskspace due to ~/.xsession-errors growing at nearly 1Kbyte/sec:

Actual behaviour

~/.xsession-errors gains these message once per second:

ALSA lib confmisc.c:855:(parse_card) cannot find card '0'
ALSA lib conf.c:5180:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_inum returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:422:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings
ALSA lib conf.c:5180:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1334:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name
ALSA lib conf.c:5180:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib conf.c:5703:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib control.c:1528:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL default

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

Use MATE in a VM (LXD container in my case) lacking sound hardware.

MATE general version

1.26.0 I guess?

Package version

1.26.0-1+deb12u1

Linux Distribution

Debian 12

Link to bugreport of your Distribution (requirement)

#942082

[lukefromdc]

This looks like it is an issue with ALSA itself, unless it occurs only in MATE. Note that when there is no sound card on bare metal, mate-media and the libmatemixer backend normally fall back to a "dummy" output so the applet doesn't crash and also can be tested.

If this is MATE-only, then something that should fall back to the dummy device is failing to do so. I have never worked in VMs and don't have any working machines with no or only removable sound right now, so I cannot work on this one myself.

Will leave fixing this for other team members that can duplicate it