[Vm-dev] Audio problems on Linux - part 1 (OSS)

[Phil B]

I'm having problems recording audio using a relatively recent (20190724)
build of the 64-bit VM on Linux (Debian 10) and was curious to see if this
is a known issue or not.  I've been running with the OSS drivers for a
while now[1] which have been running fine for audio playback at least
(provided I wrap launching the vm with padsp.)  However, I haven't needed
to record audio since I started using the OSS drivers.

So recently I wanted to record audio (specifically using
SoundPlugin primitiveSoundStartRecording/primitiveSoundRecordSamples/primitiveSoundStopRecording)
and immediately ran into problems.  The image becomes almost completely
unresponsive (regardless of what priority level I run the audio recording
process at) and at best I get back a few fragments of audio when I stop
recording.  No error messages in the console, errors in the image, etc.
Just an unresponsive image and eventually an unusable recording.

I switched over to another OS / VM (OS X 10.11) with the same image and
audio recording works just fine.  OK, so the image isn't itself doesn't
appear to be the problem, but rather some combination of my OS / VM /
driver setup.  My question is: should recording via OSS drivers be expected
to work?  If so, any suggestions on what I should be looking at?

Thinking that this might be considered an obsolete/unsupported
configuration, I try changing my VM audio drivers which results in another
issue in part 2...

[1] I started doing this due to Linux VM builds going a period of time
without alternate (ALSA/PulseAudio) audio drivers included.  Not sure if
this has been resolved or not given my issue in part 2.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/attachments/20191009/40b99674/attachment.html>