Pipewire crashing or becoming unresponsive after plugging in earphone

Steps to reproduce:
After turning on my fedora-35 laptop, if I plugin my earphone, I am unable to any videos or audio files using media players (like vlc). Even youtube videos in browser become unplayable.
I am even unable to shutdown my laptop properly after this state. I have to hold down the powerbutton for some seconds and then force shut down my laptop.

This is the message shown when I’m trying to shutdown:

[8572.490451] watchdog: watchdog did not stop
[8582.591404] systemd-shutdown[1]: waiting for process vlc, alsactl, vlc, wireplumber, pipewire

And this just stays freezed for hours. This has been bugging me for some days now.

Hi @dangerahead , welcome to the forum!

Does restarting pipewire help?

systemctl --user restart pipewire.service

it could be a pipewire issue, so good to look at your system logs and we can maybe report a bug if it is one:

Thanks. But I’ve already tried this.
Returns this error:

Failed to connect to bus: $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not defined (consider using --machine=<user>@.host --user to connect to bus of other user)

that’s odd—what does systemctl --user status pipewire say?

This is the output:

● pipewire.service - PipeWire Multimedia Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire.service.d
             └─00-uresourced.conf
     Active: active (running) since Fri 2022-02-18 20:43:53 IST; 1min 27s ago
TriggeredBy: ● pipewire.socket
   Main PID: 8377 (pipewire)
      Tasks: 2 (limit: 9356)
     Memory: 1.7M
        CPU: 33ms
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/pipewire.service
             └─8377 /usr/bin/pipewire

Feb 18 20:43:53 dangerahead systemd[1969]: Started PipeWire Multimedia Service.
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but systemctl --user restart pipewire doesn’t work?

So the service is working. I guess we start by plugging in your headphones and then checking the status of pipewire again, and your logs to see what’s happening.

if it’s a crash, we’ll probably need to report a bug.

Can you double check and see if you have any leftover configuration files in /etc/pipewire

And try as a new user to make sure you’re user configuration isn’t broken.

Thanks

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@grumpey I don’t have any config files in /etc/pipewire.
cd /etc/ && ls | grep pipewire returned nothing.

It appears to be fixed suddenly. Let me use my laptop for a bit. Perhaps the error will return again. I’ll post the log outputs once the bug reappears.

2 Likes

@ankursinha @grumpey It has not been fixed. I encountered the same bug twice today. Going to force restart my laptop for the 2nd time today.

Just ran systemctl --user restart pipewire.service, took an abnormal 6mins 1sec to run. But fixed nothing.

Attaching the output of systemctl --user status pipewire:

● pipewire.service - PipeWire Multimedia Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire.service.d
             └─00-uresourced.conf
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-02-21 20:41:54 IST; 6min ago
TriggeredBy: ● pipewire.socket
   Main PID: 48080 (pipewire)
      Tasks: 2 (limit: 9356)
     Memory: 2.3M
        CPU: 27ms
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/pipewire.service
             └─48080 /usr/bin/pipewire

Feb 21 20:41:54 dangerahead systemd[1961]: Started PipeWire Multimedia Service.
1 Like

Can you double check that you’re using the latest pipewire please. 0.3.47

Thanks

1 Like

Hi, would you like also to check with systemctl --user status wireplumber. I believe wireplumber is the responsible to managing the clients (vlc, browser, and any media related apps) also for switching audio device sinks.

A similar situation: after Fedora 35 automatically updated HDMI video/audio were listed as disconnected in PulseAudio Volume Control and unavailable.

systemclt --user status pipewire showed the device was disabled.

executed:
dnf swap wireplumber pipewire-media-session
and rebooted

HDMI remained unavailable. Disconnected the HDMI cable and reconnected it.
Video/Audio started working again.

systemctl --user status pipewire displays:

pipewire.service - PipeWire Multimedia Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire.service.d
             └─00-uresourced.conf
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-02-21 15:57:25 EST; 2h 12min ago
TriggeredBy: ● pipewire.socket
   Main PID: 1765 (pipewire)
      Tasks: 2 (limit: 18881)
     Memory: 8.6M
        CPU: 3.123s
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/pipewire.service
             └─1765 /usr/bin/pipewire