multiuser-soundcards-pulseaudio

Revision 1 as of 2010-02-09 21:06:37

Clear message

Summary

PulseAudio currently assumes all soundcards are of exclusive use to the person logged into the current X session. There are several use cases where this assumption is not valid.

We need to investigate possible solutions to this problem.

User stories

  • User Foo has one of his soundcards connected to a long cable that goes to speakers in another room, where it serves as a media player. Foo wants to control what music is being played in that room, even if someone else is sitting in front of the computer.
  • User Bar needs to run a program which needs to output a sound, regardless of who currently logged in. It could e g be some kind of alarm.

Assumptions

Removing PulseAudio is not trivial, so it would be better if we could support these use cases in PA than to throw PA out the window.

Design

Ideas:

  • What can we do with udev and ConsoleKit?

  • Move the reserve API to the system DBus?

  • Run PulseAudio as a system-wide daemon?

  • Run PulseAudio on top of dmix?

Implementation

This section should describe a plan of action (the "how") to implement the changes discussed. Could include subsections like:

UI Changes

Should cover changes required to the UI, or specific UI that is required to implement this

Code Changes

Code changes should include an overview of what needs to change, and in some cases even the specific details.

Migration

Include:

  • data migration, if any
  • redirects from old URLs to new ones, if any
  • how users will be pointed to the new way of doing things, if necessary.

Test/Demo Plan

It's important that we are able to test new features, and demonstrate them to users. Use this section to describe a short plan that anybody can follow that demonstrates the feature is working. This can then be used during testing, and to show off after release. Please add an entry to http://testcases.qa.ubuntu.com/Coverage/NewFeatures for tracking test coverage.

This need not be added or completed until the specification is nearing beta.

Unresolved issues

This should highlight any issues that should be addressed in further specifications, and not problems with the specification itself; since any specification with problems cannot be approved.

BoF agenda and discussion

Use this section to take notes during the BoF; if you keep it in the approved spec, use it for summarising what was discussed and note any options that were rejected.

CategorySpec