Pipewire doesn't support upstream google-kevin ALSA UCM config
Describe your issue
What's the expected behaviour?
The following sequence of events in the future:
- PulseAudio > 16.1 is released and packaged for Alpine Linux
-
alsa-ucm-conf-google-gru
package is dropped from pmaports - Audio devices keep working on
google-kevin
- PostmarketOS globally switches to PipeWire
- Audio devices still keep working on
google-kevin
What's the current behaviour?
Current releases of PulseAudio and PipeWire have problems with the ConflictingDevice
directive as used in the upstream ALSA UCM config for google-kevin
. With PulseAudio this results in some of the conflicting audio devices being unusable, with PipeWire it results in unusably choppy sound input/output. So, the alsa-ucm-conf-google-gru
package splits the UCM config into two Verb
s as a hack to avoid using ConflictingDevice
and things work somewhat OK.
The issue is mostly fixed in PulseAudio's master branch, patches for it were picked to PipeWire and then reverted there as they found a bug. A bugfix is awaiting review as a PulseAudio MR, and it seems unlikely that the PipeWire maintainer will pick patches before they get merged into PulseAudio first.
The alsa-ucm-conf-google-gru
package should be dropped when the next PulseAudio release is available in favor of the upstream UCM config. However, switching to PipeWire after that (and before the relevant patches get into PW) will regress audio support on google-kevin
.
@jenneron asked me to file an issue for this as it might be a valid blocker for switching to PipeWire.
How to reproduce your issue?
Not really tested on postmarketOS, but roughly:
- Remove
alsa-ucm-conf-google-gru
fromdevice-google-kevin
dependencies - Update
pulseaudio
,pipewire
packages to build from git master - Build and boot USB disk with those three custom packages
- Observe that audio devices works fine with
pulseaudio
, but not withpipewire-pulse
What device are you using?
google-kevin
Additional information
- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge_requests/596
- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/531
- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/issues/1380
- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge_requests/742
- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/merge_requests/743