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Comment by dom0 | Hacker News Reader

Firefox stopped supporting ALSA, so I had to install PA. PA gives me: a noise chirp when the PA daemon starts, which is probably some uninitialized garbage buffer. Sometimes (I don't know what triggers it, seems to be random, and no, it's not the auto-suspend module which is on by default but seems to cause a similar bug for many people) audio starts to lag by .3-.5 seconds. Restarting PA does not help; have to reboot, which I can't/won't do for days at a time. This is supposed to be a Linux system, not Windows 98.

I don't hate PA. On another machine it was always installed. But it is quite clear to me that it is yet-another layer on top of the existing infrastructure, so it statistically will cause more issues than just the infra that's there already.

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The problem with PA is that (it appears like) there aren't really any simple errors. For most software, you have a bunch of common problems that you can find on Stackoverflow easily with a reliable solution.

Pulse, on the other hand, while working fine on 99% of systems, usually fails catastrophically in creative ways on the remaining 1% and it's really hard to even understand what the problem is. (And of course, these 1% will shape public opinion. A large portion of the 99% is not even aware they're using Pulse.)

Two nines isn't very many nines. I've had problems with PA 100% of the time. Must be me, right? The only PA solution I know is purging it from my system.

what people mean when they say the vast majority of people dont have problems is "I don't care about your objectively broken experience"

Yeah, I've certainly had to learn a few tricks to debug audio issues on my Linux systems. Last one was a crash when disconnecting Bluetooth headphones, traced to PulseAudio unloading its Bluetooth plugin from code within the plugin. You don't get a backtrace if the crash is from returning into code that doesn't exist anymore. I still haven't figured out why this didn't cause crashes on all systems.

Factors which will have majorly affected people's PulseAudio experience over the years include audio hardware, what software they use with it, system uptime, local RF interference, use of suspend/resume, which patches their distro backported, and the exact stack and heap layout of the process on their system.

> Restarting PA does not help; have to reboot

Then PA is not the problem, your sound card/drivers is.

How does one go about debugging something like this to pinpoint the root cause? I am just curious. I know nothing about PA (or even sound). Thanks!

How to debug PulseAudio problems

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_PulseAudio_probl...

Thanks! I just skimmed through this and discovered strace -k (Print the execution stack trace of the traced processes after each system call). TIL

You should install apulse and run that with Firefox! Works like a charm.

You can also compile FF with ALSA enabled. Gentoo has a useflag for that.

This is the better option (aside from fixing your PA config in the first place, which I'd heavily recommend instead). apulse can get into issues with Firefox's sandboxing. It supports PulseAudio and works with ALSA too, but ALSA-pretending-to-be-PA won't work.

But really, fix your PulseAudio instead.

In theory yes. But compiling Firefox is just a mess.

./mach bootstrap && ./mach build

You can just use your distribution's package manager for that.

I thought they had plans to deprecate the build flag in a later version, but can't find verification.

It will in any case not get any maintenance, so expect things to break with no recourse as new versions are released.

This similar to how on paper Firefox can still be compiled with GTK2, but it is not supported.

> Firefox stopped supporting ALSA, so I had to install PA

PulseAudio emulation for ALSA https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

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