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lars_the_bear
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 Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2024 2:22 pm Post subject: firefox-bin -- now with added apulse? |
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Hi folks
I recently updated firefox-bin, and found it had a dependency on apulse. I don't remember that being the case in the past (but I've been wrong before).
So far as I can tell, firefox-bin still supports ALSA without the need for apulse, although I'm aware that some Linux distributions don't provide an ALSA-capable Firefox.
Has something changed in Gentoo, in this regard? Everything still seems to work -- I'm just curious.
BR, Lars. |
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rab0171610
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| Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2024 3:52 pm Post subject: Re: firefox-bin -- now with added apulse? |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: |
So far as I can tell, firefox-bin still supports ALSA without the need for apulse. |
How did you determine this? Based on what information? |
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Zucca
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| Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2024 4:48 pm Post subject: Re: firefox-bin -- now with added apulse? |
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| rab0171610 wrote: | | How did you determine this? Based on what information? |
From | Code: | | equery u firefox-bin |
Pay attention to alsa USE-flag.
And from wiki:
So I'd guess by having alsa support Firefox needs to use apulse, to transform pulse protocol (or what not) to "pure" alsa.
So yeah. Firefox doesn't have alsa backend. But apulse can be used to avoid pulseaudio.
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dmpogo
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| Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2024 4:58 pm Post subject: Re: firefox-bin -- now with added apulse? |
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| rab0171610 wrote: | | lars_the_bear wrote: |
So far as I can tell, firefox-bin still supports ALSA without the need for apulse. |
How did you determine this? Based on what information? |
As far as I see, apulse is optional. I have firefox-bin running and no apulse installed on the computer.
For the rebuild
| Code: |
pulseaudio? (
|| (
media-libs/libpulse
>=media-sound/apulse-0.1.12-r4[sdk]
)
)
|
so either libpulse or apulse will satisfy it ?
If USE='pulseaudio' is not set, there is alsa flag (which has strange description "+ + alsa : When pulseaudio isn't set, this prefers apulse" which I do not believe), but I cannot find explicit reference to this flag in the rebuild. But I would guess it should use alsa directly. |
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2024 5:54 pm Post subject: Re: firefox-bin -- now with added apulse? |
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| Zucca wrote: |
So yeah. Firefox doesn't have alsa backend. But apulse can be used to avoid pulseaudio. |
That's the odd thing -- Firefox supported native ALSA, at least until recently. I've always had "USE=alsa -pulseaudio" and I've never installed apulse, and Firefox always worked fine. It works fine still, without using Pulse or apulse. The Ubuntu and Fedora builds of Firefox don't support ALSA, and need apulse, but the Gentoo builds have been fine without so far.
I'm aware that the Firefox maintainers are not keen on supporting native ALSA, and have not been for a long time. But AFAIK the code is still there, and still works.
So I'm baffled about why I now have apulse on my system, when I didn't need it before, and don't seem to need it now.
So far as I know, the presence of libapulse alone is not sufficient to make apulse work -- there needs to be a way to interpose libapulse between the Pulse API calls and ALSA. That's what the apulse program does.
So I remain totally confused.
BR, Lars. |
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dmpogo
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| Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2024 6:09 pm Post subject: |
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Yep, if I reinstall firefox-bin with -pulseaudio
USE='-pulseaudio' emerge -pv firefox-bin:esr
it pulls in apulse. (it also requires alsa-plugins to be reinstalled without pulseaudio support). So indeed, not direct ALSA.
Saying that, I start to recall some conversation about it 2-3 years ago, are you sure it is not when ALSA support disappeared ? |
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2024 6:13 pm Post subject: |
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| dmpogo wrote: |
Saying that, I start to recall some conversation about it 2-3 years ago, are you sure it is not when ALSA support disappeared ? |
I have a feeling that the Firefox maintainers started down the crazy path of deprecating ALSA support nearly ten years ago. But, so far as I know, it hasn't disappeared. It's working fine for me right now without Pulse or apulse. That's why I'm confused about the presence of the dependency.
BR, Lars. |
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Chiitoo
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| Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2024 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | dmpogo wrote: |
Saying that, I start to recall some conversation about it 2-3 years ago, are you sure it is not when ALSA support disappeared ? |
I have a feeling that the Firefox maintainers started down the crazy path of deprecating ALSA support nearly ten years ago. But, so far as I know, it hasn't disappeared. It's working fine for me right now without Pulse or apulse. That's why I'm confused about the presence of the dependency.
BR, Lars. |
If you do
| Code: | | $ file $(which firefox-bin) |
you may find that it is a Bash script, and if you look into said script, you should find that it will indeed use 'apulse' if available without you explicitly running it via apulse.
With USE="alsa -pulseaudio" you should have had 'media-sound/apulse' around since at least 2 years ago already.
The 'firefox-bin' package is what comes from upstream directly, and does not normally provide any ALSA support, but the ebuild does a kind of magic to make it happen.
When building from source, the ALSA backend can still be enabled, but I believe it is up to the community to maintain said backend.
As for when it all started, I think this might be the upstream bug with most "conversation" about the issue:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Tue Sep 17, 2024 8:55 am Post subject: |
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| Chiitoo wrote: |
If you do
| Code: | | $ file $(which firefox-bin) |
you may find that it is a Bash script, and if you look into said script, you should find that it will indeed use 'apulse' if available without you explicitly running it via apulse.
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Thanks, but nope -- it doesn't. And if I remove the apulse binary completely, firefox-bin still produces audio.
The script does have a reference to libapulse, however. It's just set into an environment variable. I don't know whether libapulse can produce sound without the apulse process, or whether Firefox would know how to use it if it could?
Is there a way to uninstall apulse completely, without disturbing firefox-bin? Maybe that's the only way to say for sure whether it's being used or not.
If I build Firefox from source, with "USE=-pulseaudio alsa", should I expect to get a native ALSA version, without no Pulse/apulse dependencies?
Pragmatically, if Firefox works, I don't really care how. I'm just curious to understand what's going on.
BR, Lars. |
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Chiitoo
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| Posted: Tue Sep 17, 2024 12:44 pm Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | Chiitoo wrote: |
If you do
| Code: | | $ file $(which firefox-bin) |
you may find that it is a Bash script, and if you look into said script, you should find that it will indeed use 'apulse' if available without you explicitly running it via apulse.
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Thanks, but nope -- it doesn't. And if I remove the apulse binary completely, firefox-bin still produces audio.
The script does have a reference to libapulse, however. It's just set into an environment variable. I don't know whether libapulse can produce sound without the apulse process, or whether Firefox would know how to use it if it could? |
If by 'apulse binary' you mean '/usr/bin/apulse', that's a script as well, which basically does the same thing 'firefox-bin' does, loading the PulseAudio replacement libraries 'media-sound/apulse' comes with (there is no "apulse process" involved).
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | Is there a way to uninstall apulse completely, without disturbing firefox-bin? Maybe that's the only way to say for sure whether it's being used or not. |
You can forcefully remove anything using the '--unmerge' option for 'emerge', which in this case would remove the libraries provided by 'media-sound/apulse' and with that, Firefox should become quite quiet indeed.
Mandatory "you get to keep the pieces when it breaks" disclaimer here. :]
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | If I build Firefox from source, with "USE=-pulseaudio alsa", should I expect to get a native ALSA version, without no Pulse/apulse dependencies? |
Yes, with the source build, if USE="-pulseaudio" you get the ALSA backend enabled automatically (there is no USE="alsa" there), and 'media-sound/apulse' is a dependency only if USE="pulseaudio" (it needs to be installed first, or 'media-libs/libpulse' will be pulled in instead):
| Code: | pulseaudio? (
|| (
media-libs/libpulse
>=media-sound/apulse-0.1.12-r4[sdk]
)
)
[...]
local myaudiobackends=""
use jack && myaudiobackends+="jack,"
use sndio && myaudiobackends+="sndio,"
use pulseaudio && myaudiobackends+="pulseaudio,"
! use pulseaudio && myaudiobackends+="alsa,"
mozconfig_add_options_ac '--enable-audio-backends' --enable-audio-backends="${myaudiobackends::-1}" |
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Tue Sep 17, 2024 1:04 pm Post subject: |
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| Chiitoo wrote: |
If by 'apulse binary' you mean '/usr/bin/apulse', that's a script as well, which basically does the same thing 'firefox-bin' does, loading the PulseAudio replacement libraries 'media-sound/apulse' comes with (there is no "apulse process" involved).
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Yeah, my bad. I was actually looking for a specific invocation of 'apulse firefox'. But, as you say, `firefox-bin` just sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the apulse versions of libpulse.so, etc.
I don't remember seeing this additional apulse stuff before, but when I started using Gentoo, and did not know there was such a thing as 'firefox-bin', I just built Firefox from source. So I guess I've gotten mixed up, as usual.
I would prefer not to have this additional compatibility layer in Firefox, but I guess the only solution is to spend another four days building Firefox from source. I can't think what on Earth possessed the Firefox people to dump ALSA support in their binary, but I can't blame Gentoo for that.
BR, Lars. |
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rab0171610
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| Posted: Tue Sep 17, 2024 2:11 pm Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: |
I would prefer not to have this additional compatibility layer in Firefox, but I guess the only solution is to spend another four days building Firefox from source. |
I don't see how spending "four days building Firefox" is the ideal solution. It seems only logical that given the troubles you report building packages from source, accepting apulse as dependency would be the easiest solution. Maybe you should re-evaluate whether this is really that important to you. |
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Chiitoo
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| Posted: Tue Sep 17, 2024 2:31 pm Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | I would prefer not to have this additional compatibility layer in Firefox, but I guess the only solution is to spend another four days building Firefox from source. |
Looking at the Gentoo binary packages available right now, it seems that 'firefox-115.15.0-4' for example is built without USE="pulseaudio", if I'm seeing things right-like (just downloaded the tar packages and looked around in them, no testing or anything done here).
That 4-day compilation, and other compilation related things you've mentioned elsewhere, do seem a bit odd to me; my father is running Gentoo on bits and pieces of my old computers from around 2005-2008, CPU being an AMD Athlon X2 7750 if I remember right, and I still compile things with it.
That said, for bigger updates I do help it out with 'distcc', because I can, and since it will run out of RAM for things like Qt WebEngine (suppose I could add swap out of interest to see how long it would take). Might move it onto the binary packages though, since that is also now a possibility.
Granted, laptops are always a bit special... and I do have some old ones laying about, that I've received from people, and have been meaning to test how (un)well they do these days.
In any case, I digress, there is a thread on that topic already where I meant to initially post about it.
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 8:12 am Post subject: |
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| Chiitoo wrote: |
That said, for bigger updates I do help it out with 'distcc', because I can, and since it will run out of RAM for things like Qt WebEngine (suppose I could add swap out of interest to see how long it would take).
|
According to `emerge`, it need 80Gb to compile qtwebengine. In my case that would be 8Gb RAM and 72Gb swap. I'm not even going to try :/
BR, Lars. |
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Zucca
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 11:32 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | According to `emerge`, it need 80Gb to compile qtwebengine. In my case that would be 8Gb RAM and 72Gb swap. I'm not even going to try :/
BR, Lars. |
That's got to be the temporary disk space requirement.
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Chiitoo
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 11:54 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | Chiitoo wrote: |
That said, for bigger updates I do help it out with 'distcc', because I can, and since it will run out of RAM for things like Qt WebEngine (suppose I could add swap out of interest to see how long it would take).
|
According to `emerge`, it need 80Gb to compile qtwebengine. In my case that would be 8Gb RAM and 72Gb swap. I'm not even going to try :/
BR, Lars. |
That would mean you are building it with MAKEOPTS="-j40" ('-j1' would check for 2GiB, '-j2' would check for 4GiB etc.), so something not quite right there. :]
| Zucca wrote: | | That's got to be the temporary disk space requirement. |
That is checked for only 8GiB.
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 12:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Zucca wrote: | | lars_the_bear wrote: | According to `emerge`, it need 80Gb to compile qtwebengine. In my case that would be 8Gb RAM and 72Gb swap. I'm not even going to try :/
BR, Lars. |
That's got to be the temporary disk space requirement. |
It's definitely RAM:
| Code: |
* Messages for package dev-qt/qtwebengine-6.7.2:
* There is NOT at least 80 GiB RAM
*
* Memory or space constraints set in the ebuild were not met!
* The build will most probably fail, you should:
* - enhance the memory (reduce MAKEOPTS, add swap), or
* - add more space
* as required depending on the failed tests.
|
But...
I have in `make.conf`
| Code: |
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="${EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS} --jobs=40 --load-average=40
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I have no idea why -- I'm pretty sure I didn't put those settings there, because I have very little idea what they do. I only see them in this one machine, and I've installed Gentoo, perhaps, thirty times in the last couple of months. So I'm completely baffled.
I presume that these settings are wrong? In the past I've just put nothing, in the expectation that `emerge` will work them out.
BR, Lars. |
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Chiitoo
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 1:50 pm Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | I have in `make.conf`
| Code: |
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="${EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS} --jobs=40 --load-average=40
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I have no idea why -- I'm pretty sure I didn't put those settings there, because I have very little idea what they do. I only see them in this one machine, and I've installed Gentoo, perhaps, thirty times in the last couple of months. So I'm completely baffled.
I presume that these settings are wrong? In the past I've just put nothing, in the expectation that `emerge` will work them out. |
The ebuild checks for MAKEOPTS for this, not EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, but that said, 40 for 'emerge --jobs' seems pretty high as well, and could certainly explain some long compile times due to swapping.
With 'emerge --jobs 40' you could end up with 40 packages being built at the same time.
Now if MAKEOPTS has '--jobs 40' as well... that could potentially mean "build 40 packages using 40 CPUs at the same time. Of course a lot of build phases, such as configure-time, will only use 1 thread in any case, but yeah... something to look into there perhaps. :]
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 3:10 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks. Except...
I'm pretty sure I didn't make that configuration change. Until today I had no idea that these settings existed and, having looked up what they do, I don't own any hardware for which these settings would be even remotely appropriate.
I noticed the different concurrency behaviour of `emerge`, compared to what I'm used to, as soon as I started to set up the machine. I just assumed that something has changed in the stage3 file I downloaded. But I looked in the latest stage3 of the type I use, and I don't see those settings there. I don't see them on any of my other installations, either.
So either there is, by some fluke, just one stage3 file that has these settings, and that I can no longer find, or I just had a senior moment and did something really stupid. I can imagine what everybody but me would think is the more likely explanation.
Oh, well. Whatever the explanation, I shall remove those settings.
BR, Lars. |
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asturm
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 3:11 pm Post subject: |
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| No one but you could have put it there. This file is under your responsibility, as explained by the Gentoo Installation Handbook. |
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lars_the_bear
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Joined: 05 Jun 2024
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 5:48 pm Post subject: |
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| asturm wrote: | | No one but you could have put it there. |
I can certainly see why you might think that. But, if you're right, then I'm truly losing my mind. This isn't the kind of mistake a sane person could make. |
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freke
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 6:09 pm Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | asturm wrote: | | No one but you could have put it there. |
I can certainly see why you might think that. But, if you're right, then I'm truly losing my mind. This isn't the kind of mistake a sane person could make. |
Did your install start with a stage3 fetched from Gentoo-mirrors - or did you follow some other guide?
I don't recal ever (20-ish years) having emerge/portage/Gentoo having 'magically' change my make.conf (it changed from /etc/make.conf to /etc/portage/make.conf - but not without news-item iirc) |
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asturm
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 6:19 pm Post subject: |
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That is obviously the moment where you look into the Gentoo Handbook section regarding make.conf settings. It should look familiar to you, but if not, I guess a few people would be interested by what other means you have been installing Gentoo so far.
I mean, even the statement about having it installed more than 30 times during a couple of months raises a big red flag to me. You would be an expert in Gentoo configuration by now.
@freke: even that change was manual. It is still in the old location on a couple of systems of mine. |
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pjp
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 10:59 pm Post subject: |
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| Chiitoo wrote: | | Yes, with the source build, if USE="-pulseaudio" you get the ALSA backend enabled automatically (there is no USE="alsa" there), and 'media-sound/apulse' is a dependency only if USE="pulseaudio" (it needs to be installed first, or 'media-libs/libpulse' will be pulled in instead): |
So either apulse or libpulse is still required, correct? What's the difference? I have apulse installed, but emerge says I can remove it because nothing depends on it. I use firefox esr from source, and libpulse is not installed. | emerge -cav apulse: | >>> These are the packages that would be unmerged:
media-sound/apulse
selected: 0.1.13-r3
protected: none
omitted: none
All selected packages: =media-sound/apulse-0.1.13-r3 |
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Navar
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| Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2024 11:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Code: | $ equery d apulse
* These packages depend on apulse:
games-util/steam-client-meta-0-r20211228 (!pulseaudio ? media-sound/apulse[abi_x86_32])
mail-client/thunderbird-115.14.0 (pulseaudio ? >=media-sound/apulse-0.1.12-r4[sdk])
media-sound/spotify-1.2.42 (!pulseaudio ? media-sound/apulse)
www-client/firefox-115.14.0 (pulseaudio ? >=media-sound/apulse-0.1.12-r4[sdk])
$ grep -i pulse /etc/make.conf
USE="-avahi -gnome -hal -ipv6 -libav -systemd -pulseaudio -gnome-keyring \
$ ls -ld /etc/make.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Sep 14 2020 /etc/make.conf -> portage/make.conf |
These are all more or less various forms of the same outcome for logic on dependency. Which is why I'm forced to dig into the actual ebuild to [strike]sanity check[/strike] confirm, again.
| Code: |
COMMON_DEPEND="${FF_ONLY_DEPEND}
...
pulseaudio? (
|| (
media-libs/libpulse
>=media-sound/apulse-0.1.12-r4[sdk]
)
)
|
I read that as a || bash OR short circuit logic test, if left hand side not true, continue (it may be POSIX compliant too, irrelevant to deeper discussion and don't care). If -pulseaudio (which you'd usually expect to see ref'ed as !pulseaudio), then it goes off requiring the other two. Which circles back to the aforementioned bugzilla from 8+ years ago on The Great Decision. Likely to consolidate API calling code involved instead of maintaining if(not pulse audio but alsa present) {do this}. I get it, involved devs can generally do as they like, or as their corporate dictators encourage. Or fork it with all our free time and perhaps enjoy public lashings, if it gains any popularity, on why your changes == bad. This was one of the reasons I went to Gentoo around 2008. The broken pulseaudio shovelfest was too time consuming, inconsistent garbage in Ubuntu, etc. and yet forced into production, permanently. That said, I do greatly miss when pulseaudio was mostly one of the biggest concerns of the day in FOSS. 
tl;dr: the equery output shows source related packages logic depending on apulse replacement when -pulseaudio use is set.
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