Package: libpulse0
Version: 16.1+dfsg1-2+b1
Severity: normal
Tags: patch fixed-upstream
(This will appear to be a pipewire bug, but in the end it looks like the
problem is pulseaudio not closing file handles. I therefor file this bug to
libpulse0 which I believe (no developer here) is used by the clients using
pulseaudio.)
After my notebook is running quite a few days (suspended during nights, used
during days) having running multiple instances of firefox and thunderbird and
listening to music using the shortwave flatpak the sound stops working.
Shortwave shows a red 'prohibited' sign where usually would be the play button,
pa-play can't play any sound anymore, pactl throws an error:
```
someuser@pureos:~$ pactl list
Connection failure: Connection terminated
```
Using `pw-play` or `aplay` I can still play audio files.
When looking at the open files I found that there are a few thousand memfd
filehandles open:
```
# lsof | grep pulse | grep -v '/lib/\|/share/' | cut -c1-10,107- | sort | uniq
-c | sort -n
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfsd-fuse file system /run/user/1000/gvfs
Output information may be incomplete.
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.portal file system /run/user/1000/doc
Output information may be incomplete.
1 systemd /run/user/1000/pulse/native type=STREAM (LISTEN)
2 pipewire- /run/user/1000/pulse/native type=STREAM (LISTEN)
3 callaudio /memfd:pulseaudio
3 callaudio /memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)
7 firefox /memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)
10 gsd-media /memfd:pulseaudio
10 gsd-media /memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)
27 nheko /memfd:pulseaudio
27 nheko /memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)
128 pipewire- /run/user/1000/pulse/native type=STREAM (CONNECTED)
176 thunderbi /memfd:pulseaudio
184 flatpak-s /memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)
288 virt-mana /memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)
874 firefox-b /memfd:pulseaudio
940 NitrokeyA /memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)
2274 firefox-b /memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)
2378 gnome-she /memfd:pulseaudio
2378 gnome-she /memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)
9680 thunderbi /memfd:pulseaudio (deleted)
```
Sometimes it helps to stop thunderbird and firefox, restart
pipewire-pulse.socket pipewire-pulse and then try again playing sound using
e.g. `paplay`.
Other times I have to log out and in again to get rid of the rest of the open
files.
I configured pipewire-pulse to not offer unix:native for connections, but
instead only tcp and made programs use that connection by configuring
pulseaudios client.conf to disable shm and memfd and set a default-server.
This stopped the problem from occuring and no memfd entries got accumulated,
but let to other problems (volume control, general integration into gnome).
I found the following issues that might be related to the problem:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/issues/1394
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/3406
The changes following the pulseaudio issue do not seem to be integrated into
the bookworm package, yet.
To test whether they might help I compiled built the packages I have installed
for pulseaudio (libpulse-mainloop-glib0:amd64, libpulse0:amd64,
libpulsedsp:amd64, pulseaudio, pulseaudio-utils) with the following patch
applied to find out whether this would help:
```
diff -r pulseaudio-orig/pulseaudio-16.1+dfsg1/src/pulsecore/memfd-wrappers.h
pulseaudio-patched/pulseaudio-16.1+dfsg1/src/pulsecore/memfd-wrappers.h
68a69,72
#ifndef MFD_NOEXEC_SEAL
#define MFD_NOEXEC_SEAL 0x0008U
#endif
diff -r pulseaudio-orig/pulseaudio-16.1+dfsg1/src/pulsecore/shm.c
pulseaudio-patched/pulseaudio-16.1+dfsg1/src/pulsecore/shm.c
167c167
< fd = memfd_create("pulseaudio", MFD_ALLOW_SEALING);
---
fd = memfd_create("pulseaudio", MFD_ALLOW_SEALING|MFD_CLOEXEC);
```
After half a day of use I found that at least the number of open memfds
increases and once in while decreases again. I'll have to wait for a longer
period of time to find out whether the situation really improved.
