[00:06] <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)
[00:07] <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
[00:08] <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
[00:09] <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"
[00:10] <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.
[00:11] <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.
[00:13] <dtchen_> B) A lesser severity (but no less annoying) issue lies in how Ubuntu Karmic's PulseAudio handles softmodem and softMIDI applications.
[00:14] <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.)
[00:16] <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?"
[00:18] <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.
[00:19] <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:
[00:20] <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
[00:21] <dtchen_> (That isn't to say that both can't be applicable simultaneously...)
[00:22] <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.
[00:23] <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.
[00:24] <dtchen_> A question that ultimately is raised is "How can we automate this triaging? Bug patterns? etc."
[00:25] <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 **
[00:26] <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.
[00:27] <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.
[00:28] <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.
[00:29] <dtchen_> (The real grunt work was done by Tim (rtg) and Andy (apw), so buy them beers!)
[00:30] <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.
[00:32] <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.
[00:33] <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.
[00:34] <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)
[00:35] <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 **
[00:39] <hggdh> dtchen_: are you going to save this?
[00:39] <pleia2> hggdh: I'll link the logs link to the classroom wiki
[00:40] <hggdh> thank you, pleia2.
[00:41] <dtchen_> ok, good, because I was having a bear of a time copying, pasting, pg-down, copying, ...
[00:47] <nhandler> Logs from this channel are also available on irclogs.ubuntu.com automatically
[00:56] <dtchen_> linked from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Classroom
[22:45] <qwebirc10414> i need help please