pulseaudio snap does not include pacmd

[Oliver Grawert]

it would be helpful if all the tools from the pulseaudio-utils package could be included in the pulseaudio snap. i.e. to select a specific sink you need to use pacmd which is currently not provided by the snap, yet pactl, parec and paplay are included.

[Robert Liu (robertliu)]

Hi @ogra,

Agree that it would helpful to have all the tools.
I'm not sure if 'pactl [options] set-default-(sink|source) NAME' meets your needs?
For me, i use pactl to change card profile, set volume and some basic operations.

I tried to include pacmd in my test version, and got some apparmor denies.
With devmode, it works, then I found that some files and capabilities are not included in the pulseaudio interface.

## confined
$ sudo env PULSE_LOG=999 PULSE_RUNTIME_PATH=/var/run/pulse PULSE_SYSTEM=1 pulseaudio.pacmd info
Failed to open PID file '/run/pulse/pid': Permission denied
No PulseAudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon.

## devmode
$sudo env PULSE_LOG=999 PULSE_RUNTIME_PATH=/var/run/pulse PULSE_SYSTEM=1 pulseaudio.pacmd info
Memory blocks currently allocated: 1, size: 63.9 KiB.
Memory blocks allocated during the whole lifetime: 31, size: 996.4 KiB.
Memory blocks imported from other processes: 0, size: 0 B.
Memory blocks exported to other processes: 0, size: 0 B.
 [snipped]

## apparmor log, devmode
Jan 20 04:22:44 localhost kernel: [304306.229446] audit: type=1400 audit(1484886164.600:1241177): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="open" profile="snap.pulseaudio.pacmd" name="/run/pulse/pid" pid=22589 comm="pacmd" requested_mask="r" denied_mask="r" fsuid=0 ouid=0
Jan 20 04:22:44 localhost kernel: [304306.229563] audit: type=1400 audit(1484886164.600:1241178): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="ptrace" profile="snap.pulseaudio.pacmd" pid=22589 comm="pacmd" requested_mask="trace" denied_mask="trace" peer="snap.pulseaudio.pulseaudio"
Jan 20 04:22:44 localhost kernel: [304306.229744] audit: type=1400 audit(1484886164.600:1241179): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="open" profile="snap.pulseaudio.pacmd" name="/run/pulse/pid" pid=22589 comm="pacmd" requested_mask="r" denied_mask="r" fsuid=0 ouid=0
Jan 20 04:22:44 localhost kernel: [304306.229789] audit: type=1400 audit(1484886164.600:1241180): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="ptrace" profile="snap.pulseaudio.pacmd" pid=22589 comm="pacmd" requested_mask="trace" denied_mask="trace" peer="snap.pulseaudio.pulseaudio"
Jan 20 04:22:44 localhost kernel: [304306.530768] audit: type=1400 audit(1484886164.904:1241181): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="connect" profile="snap.pulseaudio.pacmd" name="/run/pulse/cli" pid=22589 comm="pacmd" requested_mask="wr" denied_mask="wr" fsuid=0 ouid=0
Jan 20 04:22:44 localhost kernel: [304306.533462] audit: type=1400 audit(1484886164.904:1241182): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="file_perm" profile="snap.pulseaudio.pacmd" name="/run/pulse/cli" pid=22589 comm="pacmd" requested_mask="r" denied_mask="r" fsuid=0 ouid=0
Jan 20 04:22:44 localhost kernel: [304306.533490] audit: type=1400 audit(1484886164.904:1241183): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="file_perm" profile="snap.pulseaudio.pacmd" name="/run/pulse/cli" pid=22589 comm="pacmd" requested_mask="r" denied_mask="r" fsuid=0 ouid=0

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

pactl does not provide a "list-sinks" command, being able to select the sink does not help much if you do not know which sink to use ;)

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

whoops i take that back, there is "list" (which lists the sinks alongside every other option)

[Tony Espy (awe)]

There are no plans to address any of the bugs in the PulseAudio snap, as 16.04 has gone EOL, and we made a decision not to publish any newer versions of PulseAudio snap. Additionally PulseAudio is being deprecated in Ubuntu Desktop and replaced with Pipewire.

Those interested in using PulseAudio on Ubuntu Core are free to maintain their version of the snap (see https://github.com/ogra1/pulse-server for reference).