Arch Linux

tfcata

Member

Registered: 2013-02-04

Posts: 25

[Solved]PulseAudio suddenly stopped working after updating system

I've updated my system and the sound suddenly is gone. Before updating the sound plays back okay. I've tried the solutions found googling such as removing the config files, killing the server, restarting etc etc. None worked. The only device listed is the dummy output. Everything seems okay, it's not running as system-wide server, etc etc.

Here's what is going on now:

After system boots, 'pulseaudio -vvvv' says 'daemon already running', but I'm sure there is only one place that started it, I checked using systemd-cgls.

Meanwhile, 'aplay -L' lists several card but, 'pacmd list-cards' shows none.

If the verbose level is set when I tried to start it manually after killing it, I can see it found one card but fell back to the dummy output. I absolutely don't understand why.

Any thoughts?

Last edited by tfcata (2019-02-13 15:18:47)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,678

Re: [Solved]PulseAudio suddenly stopped working after updating system

Either your session is broken or something is blocking access to your ALSA devices. Check your output for

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*

if anything other than your user's pulseaudio is listed there you've found the problem.

Wrt to the session,  what's your output for

loginctl session-status

how are you logging in and starting your general environment?

Last edited by V1del (2019-02-12 16:48:49)

tfcata

Member

Registered: 2013-02-04

Posts: 25

Re: [Solved]PulseAudio suddenly stopped working after updating system

Either your session is broken or something is blocking access to your ALSA devices. Check your output for

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*

if anything other than your user's pulseaudio is listed there you've found the problem.

Wrt to the session,  what's your output for

loginctl session-status

how are you logging in and starting your general environment?

'fuser' returns nothing.

Anything I should pay attention to in the loginctl's output?

Last edited by tfcata (2019-02-13 15:19:30)

tfcata

Member

Registered: 2013-02-04

Posts: 25

Re: [Solved]PulseAudio suddenly stopped working after updating system

Ok, it turns out that the cause is a bug in the kernel related to intel_iommu. It failed to do some stuff so that caused problem for the userspace programs.

Downgrading the kernel solves the problem.

So where should I go about to report the kernel bug?