alsa pipe broken every ten seconds

[guillaume le louet]

Hello.

a very fresh installation of maverick, using a newly created account does the same thing. (/ formatted, /home kept but with a new account created for the test)

Step to reproduce :
listen to any music with mplayer/vlc. Every ten senconds, there is a 1second-long mute.
on VLC, every mute makes a
"[0x9888e4c] alsa audio output error: cannot write: Broken pipe"
On the console.
Listening to music as root with mplayer does not change the result (still mute every 10s), VLC does not allow me to launch it as root.

The problem was not present with the live-cd, however there is not difference between the livecd's /etc/pulse and my present /etc/pulse (made a diff to check)
I uninstalled pulseaudio to test, and with alsa there is the same issue. So, this may not be a pulseaudio bug.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Please use apport-collect 657962

[guillaume le louet (guillaume-lelouet)]

I cannot untill this bug is fixed :
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/empathy/+bug/304889

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

In that case, getting an alsa-info dump, http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/AlsaInfo will also do.

[guillaume le louet (guillaume-lelouet)]

Thank you Luke.
Sorry for not being used to the debug tools.

[guillaume le louet (guillaume-lelouet)]

I was wrong, the correct bug for my proxy is :

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apport/+bug/94130

[CiaranG (ciarang)]

Same problem here - same error message to the console when using VLC, accompanied by audio dropouts. Similar audio dropouts occur in MythTV front end.

May just be a coincidence, but...

 lspci | grep audio
 00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)

Same device as the original reporter. This uses snd_intel8x0 and snd_ac97_codec

[Melvin Garcia (virtualspectre8)]

There's a post about this in the forums:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9959544#post9959544

I've filed a bug against the kernel thinking it's Linux' fault:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/657187

It's the same bug, I'm sure.

[guillaume le louet (guillaume-lelouet)]

same bug after last update to linux-image-2.6.35-22-generic

Thank you very much Melvin, I do agree with your thought of this being only a sign of the general freeze I had not noticed yet.

I suggest to mark it as dupplicate of that one bug 657187.

[guillaume le louet (guillaume-lelouet)]

corrected the bug by recompiling last kernel from git (see
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kernel/Compile)

here is what I did :

#!/bin/bash

mkdir -p ~/kernelBuild
cd ~/kernelBuild
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:brian-rogers/ppa # last kernel-package is bugged, here is one working
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install fakeroot build-essential crash kexec-tools makedumpfile kernel-wedge libncurses5 binutils-dev libelf-dev libdw-dev libnewt-dev libncurses5-dev asciidoc xmlto git-core
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get build-dep linux

git clone http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
cd linux-2.6
fakeroot debian/rules clean
cp /boot/config-`uname -r` .config &&\
 yes '' | make oldconfig &&\
 make-kpkg clean &&\
 CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=`getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN` fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-custom kernel_image kernel_headers
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i linux-*.deb