| dtchen_ | welp, Friday night seems as good a night as any to have an impromptu session: 1) on triaging Karmic sound bugs; 2) on the way forward in Lucid | 00:06 |
|---|---|---|
| dtchen_ | (so, as I don't suspect anyone's really lurking, this will just be a braindump to go on the bugsquad/debugging wiki) | 00:06 |
| dtchen_ | ** So, firstly, triaging Karmic sound bugs ** | 00:07 |
| dtchen_ | Probably the most important page anyone can reference is https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems/KarmicCaveats | 00:07 |
| dtchen_ | Just about anyone experiencing sound problems in Karmic should be directed to read that page first, then seek assistance using either the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel here on Freenode or by using https://answers.launchpad.net | 00:08 |
| dtchen_ | Very briefly, I'll summarise some of the points that I first mentioned in my blog post and which were later nicely written up by David H | 00:09 |
| dtchen_ | A) By far the most common problem in dist-upgrades from Jaunty to Karmic has been "the case of the missing Karmic kernel in the grub boot menu" | 00:09 |
| dtchen_ | There are ongoing efforts to diagnose precisely what's causing this symptom. What's complicating matters is that some people appear to have manually modified their grub configuration file (grub.cfg/menu.lst), so there isn't one approach to catch all culprits. | 00:10 |
| dtchen_ | If, however, as a triager or reporter, you see that the bug report mentions that you're running 9.10 (Karmic) but running a non-2.6.31-based kernel, and you *know* that you dist-upgraded from 9.04 (Jaunty) without having messed with grub or kernels, then go ahead and file the bug, then triage the bug to affect the grub source package. | 00:11 |
| dtchen_ | B) A lesser severity (but no less annoying) issue lies in how Ubuntu Karmic's PulseAudio handles softmodem and softMIDI applications. | 00:13 |
| dtchen_ | I need to emphasize that usually the bug reporter is not at fault in choosing to install the packages sl-modem-daemon or timidity. | 00:14 |
| dtchen_ | (Normally System > Administration > Hardware Drivers, better known as Jockey, offers/suggests to install the modem driver if the hardware is discovered.) | 00:14 |
| dtchen_ | What usually happens is that the user has one or more of the sl-modem-daemon or timidity packages installed, and as both of these are not natively-PulseAudio aware (but instead speak directly to ALSA), the user encounters the classic race of "who can grab the sound device first?" | 00:16 |
| dtchen_ | The culprit is actually PulseAudio's module-udev-detect module, which skips an entire ALSA hw: device once it encounters a softmodem. This is a bug in the pulseaudio source package, but it has not been resolved upstream yet. We're discussing ways to work around this symptom properly, but it touches more than just PA -- alsa-driver/linux is also involved. | 00:18 |
| dtchen_ | C) Yet another bug people are encountering is the "omg volume too loud/distorted/kills kittens" symptom, which boils down to one of two sources: | 00:19 |
| dtchen_ | --> alsa-driver/linux is misreporting the sound device's dB range, so PA either happily accepts this absurdity or flails and uses its own calculated range | 00:20 |
| dtchen_ | --> your sound hardware is good and truly fscked | 00:20 |
| dtchen_ | (That isn't to say that both can't be applicable simultaneously...) | 00:21 |
| dtchen_ | D) Some people with higher-end (non-HDA; ICE17xx-driven) sound cards are encountering an alsa-lib bug where the "front:" virtual definition incorrectly lacks the proper number of channels. | 00:22 |
| dtchen_ | As a result, when PA queries alsa-lib, it gets nonsense back and simply skips the sound device. | 00:22 |
| dtchen_ | So, right above I've summarised the four major (A, B, C, D) bug classes I've been triaging in these weeks since Karmic released. | 00:23 |
| dtchen_ | A question that ultimately is raised is "How can we automate this triaging? Bug patterns? etc." | 00:24 |
| dtchen_ | That's a very good question, and a few of us (Brad, Luke, David H, and I) are discussing how to best hook these processes into apport and checkbox. | 00:25 |
| dtchen_ | ** Next, the way forward in Lucid ** | 00:25 |
| dtchen_ | Since I will not be attending UDS-L, we've already been discussing what to do about the massive volume of user experience snafus when it comes to audio in Ubuntu. | 00:26 |
| dtchen_ | A) Firstly, on the hardware enablement (alsa-driver/linux) front, we will be rolling either weekly or daily builds of the stable alsa-driver snapshots from upstream ALSA. | 00:27 |
| dtchen_ | For Karmic, we're having quite good experiences with linux-backports-modules-alsa-karmic-generic [for desktops], because this package (well, linux-backports-modules-alsa-2.6.31-xx-generic) contains a much newer alsa-driver from 20091012. | 00:28 |
| dtchen_ | (The real grunt work was done by Tim (rtg) and Andy (apw), so buy them beers!) | 00:29 |
| dtchen_ | Since much of my hardware enablement efforts will be upstream this cycle, having these weekly/daily builds will allow early Lucid testers with *extremely* new HDA hardware to be able to help track and fix regressions. | 00:30 |
| dtchen_ | B) Secondly, similar to the USB testing images that were used during Karmic's development cycle at Linux conferences, the kernel team will be doing something similar with the above weekly/daily snapshots. In this fashion, we'll have checkbox run on a lot of bare metal, which always helps. | 00:32 |
| dtchen_ | C) Luke and I have agreed to freeze as much of the sound stack as early as possible, which probably means that we won't be shipping anything newer than ALSA* 1.0.22 (presuming it is released soon enough). | 00:33 |
| dtchen_ | Now, this point is actually up for discussion at UDS-L, so my words above need to be taken with a grain of salt. | 00:33 |
| dtchen_ | D) We're still a long way from getting everything properly integrated with PulseAudio. Even applications such as timidity should be configured to use libao instead of ALSA directly, because it's much easier to tell /etc/libao.conf to use pulse as its backend. | 00:34 |
| dtchen_ | (And that's just one application) | 00:34 |
| dtchen_ | E) Jack Audio Connection Kit will be in main for Lucid, which should finally lay to rest some w(e)ariness. | 00:35 |
| dtchen_ | ** End notes ** | 00:35 |
| hggdh | dtchen_: are you going to save this? | 00:39 |
| pleia2 | hggdh: I'll link the logs link to the classroom wiki | 00:39 |
| hggdh | thank you, pleia2. | 00:40 |
| dtchen_ | ok, good, because I was having a bear of a time copying, pasting, pg-down, copying, ... | 00:41 |
| nhandler | Logs from this channel are also available on irclogs.ubuntu.com automatically | 00:47 |
| dtchen_ | linked from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Classroom | 00:56 |
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| qwebirc10414 | i need help please | 22:45 |
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