From: Smylers Date: 11:24 on 21 Feb 2007 Subject: Something Using ALSA I return to a shell window I haven't used for a few minutes, to be greeted by the message: ALSA: underrun, at least 0ms. Gee, thanks. Not only an underrun, but one that doesn't have a negative suze! The most recent command run in that shell was whois. This computer doesn't have any speakers; it may not even have a soundcard. I've never instructed it to do anything sound-related; I've no idea what might be doing this, what an underrun is, or why I should care. But I hate that the pointless message is cluttering up my terminal. Smylers
From: jrodman Date: 11:54 on 21 Feb 2007 Subject: libao sucks Was: Something Using ALSA On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 11:24:11AM +0000, Smylers wrote: > I return to a shell window I haven't used for a few minutes, to be > greeted by the message: > > ALSA: underrun, at least 0ms. [...] > This computer doesn't have any speakers; it may not even have a > soundcard. I've never instructed it to do anything sound-related; > I've no idea what might be doing this, what an underrun is, or why I > should care. > > But I hate that the pointless message is cluttering up my terminal. This message gets dumped by libao when it doesn't get scheduled "soon" enough for its own little mind. Typically, when your window manager is configured not to do constant updates on resize/move, and X activity blocks during resizes/moves of windows, and some program which is doing audio blocks because the developers are too dumb to figure out threads or timers or async or anything, really. Of course, it doesn't help me, the user, one bit that libao is complaining to my screen. Even better is that it complains on behalf of other programs (even when you've asked them explicitly to be quiet), and it doesn't tell you 1) which program it is, or 2) even admit that the message is being spat out by libao. I guess it knows that it is doing is wrong, and wants to be sure you can't find it to shoot it. You can't even freakin' find any reasonably identifying length string of this message in the binary since I guess it sprintfs it piece by piece. I recommend nulling out the start of every debug string in the library. Hopefully you can figure out what foolish program has linked in libao using pmap or similar. You totally have me beat not even trying or wanting to run a sound related app. I really was asking for it when I ran a music-playing program. FWIW, here's my whiny bug failed against some other program that shows off this stupid behavior: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=410174 If you use my particular ball of hair, please add your thoughts. Else possibly let upstream know they are idiots. http://xiph.org/ao/ -josh
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