Arch Linux

ethersaga

Member

Registered: 2023-12-30

Posts: 5

Pipewire - no sinks available when user not logged in

Recently I have started to play around with a new Arch VM that controls a soundcard that is connected to hifi system. There is pipewire, a roc (Roc Toolkit real-time audio streaming) pipewire sink and upmpdcli DLNA/OpenHome DLNA Digital Media Renderer and Server. Everything working perfectly, there is just this one caveat I wished could be worked around:

Unless I log into a graphical session using the VM's visual console (Proxmox) the pipewire server does not see any hardware audio sinks.

pactl list sinks | grep Name
	Name: auto_null

Once logged in the sink is available and everything is working as expected

pactl list sinks | grep Name
	Name: alsa_output.usb-SmartAction_Technology_HiBy_FC1-00.analog-stereo

Since this machine was intended as a headless remote desktop system (only one user though) I installed plasma desktop on it, this was probably a mistake for this kind of server since I don't pretend to understand this dbus/systemd/rt-kit session stuff. Alls I know is systemctl --user status pipewire.service => running all the time, whether logged in or not same with wireplumber.service.

Here's a pastebin of the systemd journal during log in and logout: https://bin.disroot.org/?c429e095b88193 … zH175oALhX

I've searched around for a solution but so far no luck in finding anything on this. Would appreciate somebody pointing me in the right direction.

Last edited by ethersaga (Today 09:19:27)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,114

Re: Pipewire - no sinks available when user not logged in

By default pipewire runs as a per user service and will start up only when a login session of a given user exists and get stopped again after logout: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/User . For this simple variant of what you're intending to do you could experiment with enabling user session lingering for the user you want to be able to use this with: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System … _instances

Alternatively -- though not sure how well this works and apparently tied to the root user currently -- there's https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pipewire-system which does the necessary plumbing to try and coerce it into running as root.

Last edited by V1del (Today 11:00:45)