[SOLVED] PulseAudio permissions?

[statikregimen]

For completeness, the machine in question is an MSI GT72S-G220 gaming laptop.

EDIT: Mother of pickles...... I may have found the issue. I have eudev installed somehow instead of udev. Is that it?

Ok, I emerged sys-fs/udev, rebooted, and the issue persists

Quite a bit more google-fu lead me to viewtopic-t-1009428-start-0.html - the last post sounded super promising but didn't help.

Hideyhoe neighbor,

I'm guessing I missed some silly step, but not identifying it so far.

pavucontrol seems to list only the dummy device. Running as root, it can't even connect PA (just says it's trying forever). Following the wiki says check if another program is blocking the device or permissions.

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$ fuser -v /dev/snd/*
(no output)

However:

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$ getfacl /dev/snd/controlC0 
getfacl: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names
# file: dev/snd/controlC0
# owner: root
# group: audio
user::rw-
group::rw-
mask::rw-
other::---

My other Gentoo machine lists a 2nd user section with my username. The wiki doesn't seem to suggest what to do if the permissions go wrong, though maybe this isn't a permissions issue or something.

I'm using OpenRC. Udev and Consolekit are installed and are verified as started.

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$ lspci -k
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H HD Audio (rev 31)
        Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Sunrise Point-H HD Audio
        Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel

alsamixer shows (to paraphrase) "This device has no controls" as root (but selects the HDA Intel PCH device by default). As user, only "default" is listed in the F6 menu and by default when the program loads, it shows "Card: PulseAudio" with only a master volume available.

I did get sound seemingly randomly from the Steam chat client the other night, but nobody is online right now to help me test if that's still working.....But it was very strange.

Anyway, I'm happy to provide additional infos! Thanks in advance for any insight! <3

[eccerr0r]

I wouldn't imagine eudev to break it...

Did you get a consolekit sesson?

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$ ck-list-sessions

How are you starting your login session?

If you're not getting a session, test with

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$ ck-launch-session startx

and check if your etc-update/dispatch-conf is up to date, specifically the /etc/pam.d/* files.

[statikregimen]

eccerr0r,
Thanks for the reply!

I am just using startx on this machine. On my working machine I have XDM..

First I got (just running startx normally):

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$ ck-list-sessions
Session1:
        unix-user = '1000'
        realname = '(null)'
        seat = 'Seat1'
        session-type = 'unspecified'
        session-class = 'user'
        session-state = 'online'
        active = FALSE
        x11-display = ''
        x11-display-device = ''
        display-device = '/dev/tty1'
        remote-host-name = ''
        is-local = TRUE
        on-since = '2017-08-26T02:19:25.556119Z'
        login-session-id = '1'
        XDG_RUNTIME_DIR = '/var/run/user/1000'
        VTNr = '1'

Then I shut down X and ran ck-launch-session startx which added an additional entry:

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Session2:
        unix-user = '1000'
        realname = '(null)'
        seat = 'Seat1'
        session-type = 'unspecified'
        session-class = 'user'
        session-state = 'online'
        active = FALSE
        x11-display = ''
        x11-display-device = ''
        display-device = '/dev/tty1'
        remote-host-name = ''
        is-local = TRUE
        on-since = '2017-08-26T03:44:09.897815Z'
        login-session-id = '1'
        XDG_RUNTIME_DIR = '/var/run/user/1000'
        VTNr = '1'

I'm not sure what to do with this info.

[statikregimen]

Probably worth noting:

I did have a pretty nasty issue at first...

The short version is that the /lib directory was somehow completely wrong and possibly somehow copied from the Sabayon USB drive I was using to install (I only used it to boot and get an internet connection, but it's the only proposed hypothesis so far but no way to ever really know)....But I haven't had a single other issue with this machine since that was resolved.

Here's the resolving thread for that issue:
viewtopic-p-8108726.html

I just bring it up in case maybe something else similar got effed up.

[eccerr0r]

Ok, well you're getting a consolekit session, so that's good.

Does consolekit have USE=udev set?

Also, I don't know how eudev is set up, but look in /lib/udev/rules.d and see if there's a "70-udev-acl.rules" and "71-udev-seat.rules" ?

[statikregimen]

Ok, so the output of "emerge --info consolekit | grep udev" is long and obnoxious but yes, udev is in the USE flags.

I already emerged udev, which removed/replaced eudev.

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$ ls -l /lib/udev/rules.d/7*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  734 Jul 30 00:09 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-mouse.rules
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  473 Jul 30 00:09 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-touchpad.rules
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2967 Aug  4 04:10 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2489 Aug  4 04:10 /lib/udev/rules.d/71-udev-seat.rules
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  452 Jul 30 00:09 /lib/udev/rules.d/75-net-description.rules
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  174 Jul 30 00:09 /lib/udev/rules.d/75-probe_mtd.rules
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4816 Jul 30 00:09 /lib/udev/rules.d/78-sound-card.rules

Looks as if the 2 you mentioned are in place.

[eccerr0r]

For future reference, if you have app-portage/gentoolkit installed,

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$ equery uses consolekit

will summarize USE flags (will-be-installed and as-installed scenarios). equery is also useful in that it can check files for corruption from when it was installed (provided the database hasn't been tampered with).

Could you post the output of the above just to make sure... Also what is your /etc/make.profile pointing to?

Also what's the status of your emerge system - if you "emerge --pretend --update --deep --newuse @world" - are you clean?

[statikregimen]

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# equery uses consolekit
[ Legend : U - final flag setting for installation]
[        : I - package is installed with flag     ]
[ Colors : set, unset                             ]
 * Found these USE flags for sys-auth/consolekit-1.1.2:
 U I
 + + acl       : Add support for Access Control Lists
 - - cgroups   : Use the kernel to track processes instead of the session cookie.
 - - debug     : Enable extra debug codepaths, like asserts and extra output. If you want to get
                 meaningful backtraces see
                 https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Quality_Assurance/Backtraces
 - - doc       : Add extra documentation (API, Javadoc, etc). It is recommended to enable per package
                 instead of globally
 - - evdev     : For handling VT switching with a session controller.
 + + pam       : Add support for PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) - DANGEROUS to arbitrarily flip
 - - pm-utils  : Adds support for suspend/resume using sys-power/pm-utils
 + + policykit : Use the PolicyKit framework (sys-auth/polkit) to get authorization for suspend/shutdown.
 - - test      : Workaround to pull in packages needed to run with FEATURES=test. Portage-2.1.2 handles
                 this internally, so don't set it in make.conf/package.use anymore
 + + udev      : Enable virtual/udev integration (device discovery, power and storage device support,
                 etc)

Also, emerge system seems clean:

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# emerge --pretend --update --deep --newuse @world

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

 * IMPORTANT: 12 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'.
 * Use eselect news read to view new items.

EDIT: Oops..you asked about /etc/make.profile - I assume you meant /etc/portage/make.profile:

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$ ls -l /etc/portage/
...
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   59 Aug 17 13:52 make.profile -> ../../usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop
...

[eccerr0r]

I think you have a one off problem, exhausted all the usual installation issues as far as I know, very strange problem now.

Does your /dev/ filesystem support ACLs? (Using CONFIG_TMPFS and kernel CONFIG_TMPFS_POSIX_ACL ?)

[statikregimen]

gah...dont' say that

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# cat /usr/src/linux/.config | grep TMPFS
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y
# CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT is not set
CONFIG_TMPFS=y
CONFIG_TMPFS_POSIX_ACL=y
CONFIG_TMPFS_XATTR=y

Those are definitely enabled.

I greatly appreciate your time and help!! I'm not quite ready to give up yet, but if worse comes to worse, reinstalling would be pretty easy....just time consuming to recompile everything.

For grins, I tried adding myself to the audio group. Now getfacl shows me as having permission to /dev/snd/control* but pavucontrol still only gets a dummy device.

[ct85711]

Just so you know, if the TMPFS_POSIX_ACL is actually the issue, you don't need to reinstall the whole system. You only need to recompile the kernel and boot using the new kernel.

EDit: There may be a way to turn it off on a running kernel, but I am not that good to know how to do such a thing.

[eccerr0r]

You shouldn't need to add yourself to any groups with consolekit.

Before reinstalling, try emerge -e pulseaudio and see if it helps.
And make sure etc-update (or dispatch-conf) is up to date after re-emerging.

--- however ---

I am blind?

I just noticed
- root doesn't work <--- FORGET permissions problems!!! You have a driver problem?
You can try emerging media-sound/mpg123 for a CLI mp3 player to test. It should support pulseaudio directly. If you have alsa-utils installed, speaker-test will need to go through emulation to pulseaudio, but should still work.

- you had a "sunrise point" ICH sound hub <-- This hardware has been known to cause problems.

I heard that the sunrise point ICHs need some special firmware to work with sound, but I am not familiar with the issues. Check 'dmesg' for any sound related warnings and errors?

[statikregimen]

You're right! Twas hardware/driver issue. Your last reply lead me to try a hunch that had been festering in the back of my mind....

I set

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SND_HDA_CODEC_REALTEK=y

and wam-bam-bazooka i have sound

I could never find for sure in any of the specs for this laptop, if it used Realtek or not. And with snd_hda_intel loading, I was lead away from pursuing that any further.

Thank you for persevering with me on this!!

EDIT: OK, now maybe I really DO have a permissions issue. I remvoed myself from the audio group again and now pavucontrol is back to only showing a dummy device. Root, however, can now run alsamixer and get full controls.

[statikregimen]

A bit more google-fu and i found alsasound wasn't started, so I did:

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rc-update add alsasound default

That helped w/ the audio group issue (in my previous reply I noted that I had no sound if I wasn't in the audio group - that is resolved now)

The last lingering issue, now pulseaudio daemon doesn't seem to start until after I run alsamixer or something (e.g. if I startx first, i get no sound and only dummy device in pavucontrol, but if I run alsamixer first then the pulseaudio daemon runs, and everything is jake).

Almost there!

EDIT: Well I had the bright ideal to recompile pulseaudio and now I only get sound when I switch away from to another vt....and also only after I run alsamixer. I've tried adding pulseaudio --start to my bashrc and it starts but still don't get devices in pavucontrol until i exit X, run alsamixer, then start X again. It's weird and getting frustrating lol

EDIT AGAIN: OK... I broke down and installed XDM - it's usually what I use anyway. Now everything is happy when I copied my .xsession from my working computer. The contents of which are as follows:

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exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session qtile

Qtile being my window manager

Some day I'll go back and try again with a display manager free lifestyle but for now, my machine is up and running and I am happy

[eccerr0r]

strange, I've never needed to manually start pulseaudio - it should start autmatically. Udev should be giving permissions from what consolekit says... still a mystery worked around I think.

Still don't quite understand why it doesn't work with console login, as if you had pam-consolekit setup properly, it should also work just fine. Also if you have xdm or other display manager built with consolekit support, you should not need to ck-launch-session, it should automatically get you a consolekit session when you login.

It's one of these things that you wonder if emerge --emptytree will eventually fix things...

BTW: My consolekit/udev/openrc server, I can just login to console (text mode, no display manager) and pull up a pulseaudio application (mpg123) and it plays, I don't need to run pulseaudio server, do any chmods, or ck-launch-session... This is how it "should" work!

[statikregimen]

Earlier on I tried starting it manually, but I don't recall the outcome. But the most recent attempts at getting pulse to start were via bashrc and xinitrc - both of which were successful in starting it but I'd only actually get sound (or anything other than dummy device in pavucontrol) if I ran alsamixer first, then ran startx...

I did notice these lines in my syslog just today:

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Aug 27 13:57:10 adrian pulseaudio[4802]: [pulseaudio] server-lookup.c: Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11
Aug 27 13:57:10 adrian pulseaudio[4802]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11
Aug 27 13:57:10 adrian pulseaudio[4802]: [pulseaudio] bluez5-util.c: GetManagedObjects() failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.bluez was not provided by any .service files

which is among the lines of evidence that lead me to install xdm. However, those are still appearing (last boot, anyway, few hours ago prior to this post).

I will try to modify my xsession file - I don't know why the other computer has all those things in there. May have been remnants of some prior troubleshooting or something.

EDIT: Ok so now my .xsession is this:

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exec qtile

and all seems OK. Having some extreme performance issues w/ games but that's something else, I think.

Also, I removed that line from my other machine's xsession file and it is happy as well. Still no clue why I had it in there...

[eccerr0r]

You know, maybe that is just it, though I didn't login through the GUI, my server does have lightdm running. Perhaps that is the trick. Weird.

[statikregimen]

You know, maybe that is just it, though I didn't login through the GUI, my server does have lightdm running. Perhaps that is the trick. Weird.

I mean, obviously xdm did something to my session that startx did not do by itself but I'm not clear on what? I'm fairly noob so I can't even begin to speculate.


Again, though, I thank you very much for your time... At least we got it going now and I couldn't have done it without you!