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from the all-your-computer-are-belong-to-us dept.
At the All Systems Go conference in Berlin 20-22 September, Lennart Poettering proposed a new extension to systemd, systemd-homed.service. A video of his session can be downloaded from media.ccc.de with accompanying slides [PDF].
In his presentation, Poettering outlines a number of problems he sees with the current system, like /etc needs to be writeable, UIDs need to be consistent across systems, and lack of encryption and resource management.
His goals with the proposed solution are migrateable and self-contained, UID-independent home directories with extensible user records that unify the user's password and encryption key; LUKS locking on system suspend; and Yubikey support.
He identifies a number of problems this new idea could cause with SSH logins, disk space assignments, UID assignments, and LUKS locking.
He plans to introduce JSON user records that can be queried via a Varlink interface and to a certain extent are convertible to and from existing formats. The home directories will be stored as LUKS-encrypted files that will be managed by the proposed new service, systemd-homed.service. The system integration will be supported by pam_systemd and systemd-logind.service.
It will be interesting to see how the world responds to this new take on systemd's ever-increasing encroachment of Linux.
... and lastly, this story is brought to you from a systemd-free laptop.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday September 22 2019, @03:06PM (8 children)
Alsa was only "working" if you tack on the adjective "poorly". I can't tell you how many times I had to deal with an audio source refusing to play or crashing the program it was part of because something else had the entire damned audio system tied up under alsa; hundreds at least. Yes, pulseaudio's a fucked up pile of monkey turds. But it still works more reliably than alsa ever did.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @03:57PM (2 children)
I did hours long sets with alsa, not a single dropout even with cpu under stress.
I used the default mpv and pulseaudio, presentation worked fine at home, failed in the field without error messages, likely because of no network, which was the only differing aspect.
Yes default alsa can do only one application at a time, i also can listen to one thing at a time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 23 2019, @01:00AM (1 child)
I can listen to music, video game sounds, and system/app notification sounds all at the same time. Maybe you should practice more.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @02:10PM
I practiced monitoring a song and beatmux another since the SL1210mk2 setup in 1996. In fact the sessions I talked about were timestretched mp3 flacs and wavs output by mixxx to two separate stereo tracks to an audio mixer, its output picked up by the same USB audio card input and recorded using arecord. All on a pulseaudioless 10+ year old core i5 2.6ghz laptop.
I also turn the volume all the way down on the desktop so not to be bothered by notifications and autoplaying stuff. For your use case there is dmix.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:41PM
Not on my system it doesn't. Unless you count 'reliability' as reliably crashing every time I try to change the volume when watching streamed video via Firefox (and not just YouTube). I now wear my headphones around my neck or behind my ears to listen to anything important.
I am reasonably good at diagnosing IT issues and finding solutions or workarounds. Pulseaudio has me beat.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:16PM (2 children)
Alsa supports (since forever) setting up a software mixer, if your hardware does not natively support this. You don't need pulse audio to achieve this.
It is a bit arcane of a config, it you want to set up from just docs, but there are tons of examples around, if all you want is a mixer, or just a mixer with a volume boost, etc.
Since Alsa came out, I have never seen a crash due to Alsa.
Personally, I don't now, and didn't understand, at the time, why Linux created Alsa, instead of just improving OSS.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 23 2019, @01:01AM
I'll admit, I do miss being able to cat .wav files to /dev/dsp
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @01:02AM
Same reason why git came into being: Hannu Savolainen wanted to make money off of OSS, and provided only a crippled edition for Linux.
(Score: 2) by hwertz on Monday September 23 2019, @06:22AM
Agreed. Apparently ALSA worked pretty nicely if you had a fancier card that supports multiple card users and mixes them on the card; I never had one of these, so the first ALSA user would get the card, the second would (depending on how it was written) either detect the card was busy and have no sound, or simply attempt to open the audio device and block (making that app lock up until the audio device freed up.)
Pulseaudio is (or at least was last I looked) messy code, but they seem to have gotten the kinks worked out well over 5 years ago, and for me it's worked a treat. It works for "normal" use (i.e. playing a video but still having notification beeps or whatever). It successfully (not useful really but cool) let me pipe audio from computer to phone, and phone to computer, via bluetooth. And, I was able to use pactl and such to persuade pulseaudio to use a SDR (software defined radio) receiver app that was expecting to dump audio out to speaker, and pipe that audio straight into a decoder app that was expecting it's input to come into the headphone jack from a physical radio. Instructions to do this kind of thing in Windows, they buy a $20-30 app to do virtual audio loopback; pulseaudio does it for free.