Odi's astoundingly incomplete notes

I noticed that Firefox was not playing any sound any more. Apparently pulseaudio stopped working. Manually running pa showed the following error:

xmalloc.c: Assertion 'size < (1024*1024*96)' failed at /var/tmp/portage/media-sound/pulseaudio-10.0/work/pulseaudio-10.0/src/pulse/xmalloc.c:72, function pa_xmalloc0(). Aborting.

This means it is trying to allocate a ridiculous amount of memory.

Looking at the backtrace in gdb reveals:

(gdb) bt
#0  0x00007ffff6a5ef50 in raise () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#1  0x00007ffff6a60bfa in abort () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#2  0x00007ffff7914b32 in pa_xmalloc0 () from /usr/lib64/libpulse.so.0
#3  0x00007ffff7ba1db1 in pa_database_open () from /usr/lib64/pulseaudio/libpulsecore-10.0.so
#4  0x00007fffeed60468 in module_card_restore_LTX_pa__init () from /usr/lib64/pulse-10.0/modules/module-card-restore.so
#5  0x00007ffff7b5ac98 in pa_module_load () from /usr/lib64/pulseaudio/libpulsecore-10.0.so
#6  0x00007ffff7b49751 in ?? () from /usr/lib64/pulseaudio/libpulsecore-10.0.so
#7  0x00007ffff7b4fd2c in pa_cli_command_execute_line_stateful () from /usr/lib64/pulseaudio/libpulsecore-10.0.so
#8  0x00007ffff7b50551 in pa_cli_command_execute_file_stream () from /usr/lib64/pulseaudio/libpulsecore-10.0.so
#9  0x0000000000406e55 in main ()

So it is trying to read some database. What database?

strace tells us quickly:

open("/home/xoxo/.pulse/91b2f1e2678a89a9c38b83075061a39a-card-database.x86_64-pc-linux-gnu.simple", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 9

So likely this thingy is corrupt. Solved this with:

rm -rf .pulse



posted on 2017-12-01 15:05 UTC in Code | 0 comments | permalink