PipeWire Hackfest

So we kicked off the PipeWire hackfest in Edinburgh yesterday. We have 15 people attending including Arun Raghavan, Tanu Kaskinen and Colin Guthrie from PulseAudio, PipeWire creator Wim Taymans, Bastien Nocera and Jan Grulich representing GNOME and KDE, Mark Brown from the ALSA kernel team, Olivier CrĂȘte,George Kiagiadakis and Nicolas Dufresne was there to represent embedded usecases for PipeWire and finally Thierry Bultel representing automotive.

The event kicked off with Wim Taymans presenting on current state of PipeWire and outlining the remaining issues and current thoughts on how to resolve them. Most of the first day was spent on a roadtable discussion about what are and should be the goals of PipeWire and what potential tradeoffs there would be going forward. PipeWire is probably a bit closer to Jack than PulseAudio in design, so quite a bit of the discussion went on how that would affect the PulseAudio usecases and what is planned to ensure PipeWire works very well for consumer audio usecases.

Personally I ended up spending quite some time just testing and running various Jack apps to see what works already and what doesn’t. In terms of handling outputing audio with Jack apps I was positively surprised how many Jack apps I was able to make work (aka output audio) using PipeWire instead of Jack, but of course we still have some gaps to cover before PipeWire is ready as a drop-in Jack replacement, for instance the Jack session management protocol needs to be implemented first.

The second day we outlined the areas that need work before we are ready to replace PulseAudio and came up with the following list:

  • Mixers – This is basically dealing with hardware mixers. Arun and Wim started looking at a design for this during the hackfest.
  • PulseAudio services – This is all the things in PulseAudio that is not very suitable for putting inside PipeWire. The idea is instead to put them in a separate daemon. This includes things like network streaming, ROAP, DBus apis and so on.
  • Policy/Session handling – We plan to move policy and session handling out of PulseAudio to make it easier for different usecases to set their own policies. PipeWire will still provide some default setup, but the idea here is to have a separate daemon(s) to provide this. Bastien Nocera started prototyping a setup where he could create policy and session handling using Lua scripting.
  • Filters
  • Bluetooth – Ensuring we have great bluetooth support with PipeWire. We would want to move Bluetooth handling to its own daemon, and not have it inside like in PulseAudio to allow for more flexibility with various embedded bluetooth stacks for instance. This could also mean looking at the Linux Bluetooth stack more widely as things are not ideal atm, especially from a security viewpoint.
  • Device reservation – We expect to replace Jack and PulseAudio in steps, starting with PulseAudio. So dealing well with hardware reservation is important to allow people to for instance keep running Jack alongside PipeWire until we are ready for full replacement.
  • Stream Monitoring – Important feature from Jack and PulseAudio that still needs implementing to allowing monitoring audio devices and streams.
  • Latency handling – Improving ways we can deal with hardware latency in for instance consumer devices such as TVs

It is still a bit hard to have a clear timeline for when we will be ready to drop in PipeWire support to replace PulseAudio and then Jack, but we feel the Wayland migration was a good example to follow where we held off doing the switch until we felt comfortable the move would be transparent to most users. There will of course always be corner cases and bugs, but we hope that in general people agree that the Wayland transition was done in a responsible manner and thus could be a good example to follow for us here.

We would like to offers big thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring travel for some of the community attendees and to Collabora for sponsoring dinner for all attendees the first night.

If you want to take a look at PipeWire, Wim updated the wiki page with PipeWire build intructions to be up-to-date. The hackfest attendees tested them out so we are sure they work, just be aware that you want the ‘Work’ branch and not the Master branch, as that is the one where all the audio work is happening. The Master branch is the video focused branch we use in Fedora for desktop remoting support in browsers and VNC under Wayland.

Fedora Toolbox ready for testing!

As many of you know we kicked of a ambitious goal to revamp the Linux desktop when we launched Fedora Workstation 4 years. We wanted to remove many of the barriers to adoption of Linux as a desktop and make it a better operating system for all, especially for developers.
To that effect we have been pushing a long range of initiatives over the last 4 years ago, ranging from providing a better input stack through libinput, a better display system through Wayland, a better audio and video subsystem through PipeWire, a better way of doing application packaging and dependency handling through Flatpak, a better application installation history through GNOME Software, actual firmware handling for Linux through Linux Vendor Firmware Service, better manageability through Fleet Commander, and Project Silverblue for reliable OS updates. We also had a lot of efforts done to improve general hardware handling, be that work on glvnd and friends for dealing with NVidia driver, the Bolt project for handling Thunderbolt devices better, HiDPI support in the desktop, better touch support in the desktop, improved laptop battery life, and ongoing work to improve state of fingerprint readers under Linux and to provide a flicker free boot experience.

One thing though that was clear to us was that as we where making all these changes to improve the ease of use and reliability of Linux as a desktop operating system we couldn’t make life worse for developers. Developers are the lifeblood of Fedora and Linux and thus we have had Debarshi Ray working on a project we call Fedora Toolbox. Fedora toolbox creates a seamless experience for developers when using an immutable OS like Silverblue, yet want to be able to install the wonderful world of software libraries and tools that makes Linux so powerful for developers. Fedora Toolbox is now ready for early adopters to start testing, so I recommend jumping over to Debarshi’s blog to read up on Fedora Toolbox.

GStreamer Conference 2018

For the 9th time this year there will be the GStreamer Conference. This year it will be in Edinburgh, UK right after the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, on the 25th of 26th of October. The GStreamer Conference is always a lot of fun with a wide variety of talks around Linux and multimedia, not all of them tied to GStreamer itself, for instance in the past we had a lot of talks about PulseAudio, V4L, OpenGL and Vulkan and new codecs.This year I am really looking forward to talks such as the DeepStream talk by NVidia, Bringing Deep Neural Networks to GStreamer by Pexip and D3Dx Video Game Streaming on Windows by Bebo, to mention a few.

For a variety of reasons I missed the last couple of conferences, but this year I will be back in attendance and I am really looking forward to it. In fact it will be the first GStreamer Conference I am attending that I am not the organizer for, so it will be nice to really be able to just enjoy the conference and the hallway track this time.

So if you haven’t booked yourself in already I strongly recommend going to the GStreamer Conference website and getting yourself signed up to attend.

See you all in Edinburgh!

Also looking forward to seeing everyone attending the PipeWire Hackfest happening right after the GStreamer Conference.