pulseaudio and kvm...

[Stephen Adler]

Thanks Matt,

The issue is not so much Firefox but the virtual machine in my opinion. 
I'm pretty sure Firefox uses the alsa sound driver, its the virtual 
machine which grabs a hold of the raw sound device. I'll do more testing 
this weekend on this. The question I have is how do I force the virtual 
machine to use the alsa sound drivers. I couldn't find any configuration 
parameters using the virutal machine manager GUI tool...

Matthew Gillen wrote:
> Stephen Adler wrote:
>   
>> Guys,
>>
>> It seems that when I play a utube video clip in my web browser, my kvm 
>> virtual machine looses the ability to play sound. I have to shutdown 
>> firefox, before the virtual machine will then play sound. I was 
>> wondering if the kvm virtual machines are configured to use alsa or 
>> pulse audio? Or do they grab the audio device directly?
>>     
>
> The whole point of ALSA was to get rid of the notion that only a single pid
> could write to the sound device.  Even if your adobe-flash plugin (playing
> youtube) uses the OSS interface, the current "OSS" drivers are emulated by
> ALSA.  So if you're using ALSA drivers (and you'd have to make some extra
> effort to not use them, since AFAIK they're the default for all hardware now),
> there shouldn't be an issue like you're describing.
>
> It sounds like a buggy ALSA driver if it allows one pid to prevent other pids
> from writing to the device.
>
> All the ALSA drivers are pre-pended by 'snd'.  If you do an 'lsmod', you
> should see a bunch of
>  snd-*-oss
> lines.  What's your lsmod output look like, or better yet, what does the diff
> of before and after you watch a youtube video (but before you close firefox)
> look like?
>
>
> Matt
>
>