[alsa-devel] PulseAudio and softvol

[Arun Raghavan]

Hello,
A number of users have intermittently(?) been hitting a crash in
alsa-lib 1.0.27 [1, 2] related to the softvol plugin. I'm not able to
reproduce this reliably, so can't find an easy way to debug/fix.

However, this raises a tangential question - why do we need softvol to
be plugged for 'front' at all? David explained to me that this is to
guarantee the existence of a PCM control. Perhaps I don't fully
understand this, because I'm unconvinced by the reason. Could someone
explain/refute?

This is especially bad for us, from PulseAudio's perspective, because we
aren't getting a zero-copy path.

Cheers,
Arun

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=953352
[2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64299