pipewire-pulse gets killed whenever something tries to use it

[diniamo]

Describe the bug

The title says everything, by "whenever something tries to use it", I mean when something tries to play audio, or query data (eg.: control programs like pavucontrol or pulsemixer).

Steps To Reproduce

I have no idea, I haven't opened an issue, because with my luck, this could have been one of a kind, but I found someone else who has this.

Expected behavior

Pipewire-pulse and applications that use the pulse backend work fine.

Additional context

Dmesg doesn't contain any messages about the OOM killer being the culprit.

Is there any way to figure out what's killing it?

Notify maintainers

@K900 (I know you've tried to help, but tagging nonetheless)

Metadata

[user@system:~]$ nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m"
 - system: `"x86_64-linux"`
 - host os: `Linux 6.10.3, NixOS, 24.11 (Vicuna), 24.11.20240812.9fa5c97`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `yes`
 - version: `nix-env (Lix, like Nix) 2.90.0-rc1`
 - nixpkgs: `/nix/store/vsrna35znxh8phnf7xywxqw3il9201kw-source`

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[K900]

Is it actually being killed, or is it crashing? Do you have a core dump?

[diniamo]

pipewire-pulse.service: Main process exited, code=killed, status=9/KILL

[K900]

Try running it along with killsnoop from bcc, that should tell you what is killing every process.

[diniamo]

Doesn't give me anything for pipewire-pulse, works for other programs though.

[K900]

That is very strange. Actually, are you using the hardened profile or anything like that?

[diniamo]

Hardened profile where?

[K900]

In your NixOS config. Can you post your entire configuration, actually?

[diniamo]

https://github.com/diniamo/niqs - The bug happens on the thinkpad host (which I should rename because as it turns out, it's not a actually a thinkpad).

Relevant parts (?):

• https://github.com/diniamo/niqs/blob/c88a0ff8bc8a0dec687b37e219498cff36be3121/modules/workstation/services.nix#L34-L40
• https://github.com/diniamo/niqs/blob/c88a0ff8bc8a0dec687b37e219498cff36be3121/modules/shared/boot.nix#L40

[K900]

It's very hard to figure out what is going on there. What does echo $LD_PRELOAD output?

[diniamo]

It's empty.

[K900]

At this point the only idea I can think of is to run it under a debugger and observe.

[diniamo]

I'm not sure why a debugger would give me anything when it's just killed. Either way running it under gdb does, in fact, not give me anything. Otherwise, what did you mean?

[AhuracMusic]

Bumping this to share a fix. For some reason, enabling rtkit worked for me. You already had it enabled at the time so we still don't know why this happens.

{
  security.rtkit.enable = true;
}

[diniamo]

I didn't though?

[AhuracMusic]

I think I misread your conf, in /modules/workstation/gaming.nix the line about rtkit isn't unconditionally applied ?
If you found another workaround, I'm curious. Otherwise, you have this trick in the meantime.

[Frontear]

I wonder if this may have any relation to #348155

[AhuracMusic]

In my case the socket succeeds to launch pipewire-pulse.service, it's just that it gets killed whenever a program uses it.

[diniamo]

I think I misread your conf, in /modules/workstation/gaming.nix the line about rtkit isn't unconditionally applied ? If you found another workaround, I'm curious. Otherwise, you have this trick in the meantime.

@AhuracMusic That module isn't enabled on my laptop.

[SpiderUnderUrBed]

I am having a similar bug on hyprland enabled via home-manager, and I expect the same issue to be present if hyprland was enabled in nixos:
nix-community/home-manager#6044
I tried enabling rtkit (by that I mean it was already enabled) and the issue was not fixed, also, when I try to play a youtube video, I do not notice pipewire-pulse crashing, its systemd logs show that its up and running. However the youtube video cannot play as it cannot connect to pipewire-pulse. When I tried to run pavucontrol, I noticed that it was stuck trying to look for pulseaudio. So my assumtion is that hyprland cannot access pipewire or pulseaudio, I was talking about this with a few people, one of them mentioned dbus access, however I dont know any more debugging steps I can take at this moment to confirm or deny the cause, several other people are experiencing this issue on hyprland and XFCE.

[diniamo]

Once again, this has nothing to do with Hyprland.