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Bug 486525 - Pulseaudio disregards the --disable-shm command line option
Summary: Pulseaudio disregards the --disable-shm command line option
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: pulseaudio
Version: 10
Hardware: i386
OS: Linux
low
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Lennart Poettering
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks: K12LTSP
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2009-02-20 06:11 UTC by Darryl Bond
Modified: 2009-02-26 21:28 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2009-02-26 16:01:27 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:

Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Darryl Bond 2009-02-20 06:11:17 UTC 
Description of problem: Pulse audio dies on LTSP clients with low memory

Client is Fedora 10 LTSP. 

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
pulseaudio-0.9.14-1.fc10.i386


How reproducible:
Pulseaudio dies on a thin client with 64MB of RAM which includes 8MB of Video RAM.
The pulse audio startup script command is 
 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --system \
                --exit-idle-time=-1 \
                --disable-shm=1 \
                --no-cpu-limit \
                --resample-method=trivial \
                --high-priority \
                -L module-detect \
                -L "module-esound-protocol-tcp auth-anonymous=1" \
                -L "module-native-protocol-tcp auth-anonymous=1" \
                -L module-volume-restore \
                -L module-rescue-streams \
                -L module-native-protocol-unix \
                -n

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Boot the client
2. Check for running processes
3. Find that pulseaudio is not running
  
Actual results:
Re-running the command
W: main.c: Running in system mode, but --disallow-exit not set!
W: main.c: Running in system mode, but --disallow-module-loading not set!
E: shm.c: mmap() failed: Cannot allocate memory
E: core.c: pa_mempool_new() failed.
E: main.c: pa_core_new() failed.

From strace:
open("/dev/shm/", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = 5
fstat64(5, {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=40, ...}) = 0
getdents64(5, /* 2 entries */, 4096)    = 48
getdents64(5, /* 0 entries */, 4096)    = 0
close(5)                                = 0
mmap2(NULL, 67108864, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = -1 ENOMEM (Cannot allocate memory)
open("/usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/share/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/share/locale/en.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/share/locale/en.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/share/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
ioctl(2, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, {B38400 opost isig icanon echo ...}) = 0
write(2, "E: shm.c: \33[1;31mmmap() failed: C"..., 59E: shm.c: mmap() failed: Cannot allocate memory
) = 59
ioctl(2, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, {B38400 opost isig icanon echo ...}) = 0
write(2, "E: core.c: \33[1;31mpa_mempool_new("..., 47E: core.c: pa_mempool_new() failed.
) = 47
ioctl(2, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, {B38400 opost isig icanon echo ...}) = 0
write(2, "E: main.c: \33[1;31mpa_core_new() f"..., 44E: main.c: pa_core_new() failed.

Note that even with --disable-shm and running in --system it tried to allocate 64MB RAM
Expected results:
pulse audio should take notice of the --disable-shm and --system flag and not use shared memory as documented in the man page 


Additional info:

Adding the following lines to the pulse/daemon.conf file resolved the problem:
disable-shm = yes
shm-size-bytes = 1048576 # setting this 0 will use the system-default, usually 64 MiB
I have not tried to optimise the shm-size-bytes just tried 1M and it worked.
Comment 1 Lennart Poettering 2009-02-25 02:08:32 UTC 
This is a misunderstanding --disable-shm only disables usage of SHM as transport. The PA internal memory allocation will still use a 64mb pool, allocating with mmap().

Note that even though we allocate 64mb initially this doesn't mean we actually use this memory. Due to how modern operating systems work this is only allocation of address space -- not of actual memory. The memory is only allocated when the memory is first accessed. Hence it should be fine to allocate that much even on systems with little memory.

The only drawback of this logic is that pages are never handed back to the kernel this way: if memory is used once it stays in the pool and is never given back, however reused the next time.  If this is a problem, shm-size-bytes is of help.
Comment 2 Warren Togami 2009-02-25 05:16:03 UTC 
Lennart, what is the drawback of using an exceedingly small shm-size-bytes like 1MB?  4MB?  (Please go ahead and close again after you have answered this question.)
Comment 3 Lennart Poettering 2009-02-26 16:01:27 UTC 
TBH I have no idea what the real-life effect of that will be. If the pool is full PA will fallback to malloc() for allocating memory blocks. Hence I assume the effect is not that bad. 

Try to set it to 1MB and check if that works fine!

BTW, I PA git now hands back those pages to the kernel when idle.
Comment 4 Darryl Bond 2009-02-26 21:04:15 UTC 
I set the shm-size-bytes = 65536 (64kb) without any adverse effects that I can see (hear).
Comment 5 Warren Togami 2009-02-26 21:28:21 UTC 
Is it possible to set this option without using the conf file?  Command line option?
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