On March 31, 2010, you wrote: [ Deleted ] More follow up.
I woke up this morning, to find that amarok had gotten into a loop where it was playing Pavarotti's Mattinata multiple times in a row, and occasionally allowing other songs to play. In the last 3 hours, Mattinata probably played 15-20 times. Where does amarok get random number from? Is it reading /dev/random? Maybe my computer is running out of entropy, and that is how these repetitious loops are coming from? I would hope that amarok isn't reading all of its random numbers from /dev/random. I can see applications like amarok reading 1 number from /dev/random at startup, to serve as a seed for some RNG. Networking probably has a need for higher quality random numbers, but playing music could probably get by with just about any old RNG. What brings up this thought, is that there is some package which allows entropy in the audio system to feed back into /dev/random. At night, the only thing generating entropy might be the audio system. If amarok is the only thing generating and using entropy, it could get to the point where it keeps getting the same numbers over and over. I went over to the Git source tree for amarok, thinking there might be some file which obviously is involved in random numbers, but nothing looked likely to me. I suppose it could easily end up being kdelibs or even Qt that is providing the random numbers. But whether one is talking kdelibs or Qt, I still don't think that /dev/random should be the source. Sure, pull a seed from /dev/random, but there are lots of RNG (Numerical Recipes has some) that should be good enough for music, card games, and whatever else the GUI needs. Anyway, that is just a guess as to where this behavior is coming from. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
