[sldev] PulseAudio/OpenAL-soft 1.10.622 with SLVoice

[Dickson, Mike (ISS Software)]

Carsten,

  I did some work to change the flow in OpenAL from multiple main loops/contexts to a single one as recommended on the pulseaudio list. With that I got a simple capture/playback partially working with pulse for capture and  playback.  Still some race conditions in the library however.  No luck with SLVoice (though I can get playback to reliably work with the latest openal release).  None of what I did is any kind of shape to go upstream and there are still real issues with it.  Honestly it's hard to tell what the issues are.  It seemed to me like the approach in the openal library ought to have worked albeit more expensively that sharing a mainloop and context.  

Sadly I needed to re-image the machine I was using as I really needed a reliable platform for my 3d work and without the voice pieces it makes collaborating hard to do.  My instincts are that there are still issues in both the pulseaudio support and openal so it maybe be another distro release cycle before we see something that fully works.  For instance using the alsa emulation was also unreliable for me and that I'm afraid is pretty much all pulseaudio.

  Course it would be nice also if the voice component was fully open as you could do a better job of getting to the bottom of it (nudge).

Sorry I don't have better news.  I hope this helps.

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Carsten Juttner [mailto:carjay at gmx.net] 
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 5:51 PM
To: Second Life Developer Mailing List
Cc: Dickson, Mike (ISS Software)
Subject: PulseAudio/OpenAL-soft 1.10.622 with SLVoice

Hello,

I've stumbled across the already known pulseaudio or rather openal 
related issues as well now. Additionally I have the additional 
difficulty of using this from a 64 bit environment.

 From my first looks it seems to be a deadlock inside OpenAL between 
mainloop and the control thread.
Which is what you pointed out on the list as well.

Mike, since I saw your post on the openal-developer list I wonder if you 
got any further.

I'm using Karmic Koala 9.10 64 bit but already updated to the git 
version of openal-soft for testing.

Regards,
Carsten