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Re: Switch default from PulseAudio to PipeWire (and WirePlumber) for audio



On Wed, 2022-09-14 at 11:56 +0200, Dylan Aïssi wrote:
[...]
> The issue mentioned here regarding choppy audio in case of high CPU load and
> related rtkit errors messages, should be reduced with the next pkg version.
> As recommended by upstream [4], it will create a pipewire system group and set
> security limits [5]. The decision remains to users to add themselves in the
> pipewire group.
[...]

This and the linked documentation makes me rather wary of PipeWire.

The purpose of RTKit is to allow limited use of real-time priority
without the risk of locking up the system if a real-time task starts
spinning.

What you are talking about with the pipewire group is bypassing RTKit
and allowing all processes started by certain users to use real-time
priority.  This does not seem like a good idea at all.

The alternative recommendation there seems to be, to reconfigure RTKit
to disable most of its safeguards.  (This might be wrong; I haven't dug
through the RTKit documentation.)

I understand that applications with very low latency requirements may
need this sort of performance tweaking.  But this is not the normal
case, and PulseAudio hasn't required this.  If PipeWire does, I think
that's a serious limitation in PipeWire, and it is not ready for us to
make it the default.

Ben.


-- 
Ben Hutchings
Design a system any fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

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