Pulseaudio remote

[josa41]

Description of changes

Initial Passthrough of Sound card for Lenovo X1 with pulseaudio backend for chromium
ADR documentation for the current implementation

Checklist for things done

• Summary of the proposed changes in the PR description
• More detailed description in the commit message(s)
• Commits are squashed into relevant entities - avoid a lot of minimal dev time commits in the PR
• Contribution guidelines followed
• Ghaf documentation updated with the commit - https://tiiuae.github.io/ghaf/
• PR linked to architecture documentation and requirement(s) (ticket id)
• [ X] Test procedure described (or includes tests). Select one or more:
  • Tested on Lenovo X1 x86_64
  • [-] Tested on Jetson Orin NX or AGX aarch64
  • [-] Tested on Polarfire riscv64
• [-] Author has run nix flake check --accept-flake-config and it passes
• All automatic Github Action checks pass - see actions
• Author has added reviewers and removed PR draft status

Testing

Chromium VM sound playback works on Lenovo X1
GuiVM can control pulseaudio with pamixer (or similar tool)
For GuiVM audio control:

# Open tcp-ssh tunnel to audioVM port 4713 in shell:
tcp-ssh audio-vm.ghaf 4713
# With the ssh tunnel AudioVM Pulseaudio server can be accessed from localhost:4713
export PULSE_SERVER=localhost
# use pamixer (for example to toggle mute with "-t")
pamixer -t

[leivos-unikie]

@leivos-unikie - please test this.

Started building...

[leivos-unikie]

Tested pamixer options on gui-vm while playing youtube video. Mute/unmute and setting volume seems to work fine from gui-vm.

However, I noticed some clear glitches in the sound while listening music. Compared also to my work laptop Lenovo T14 in the same home network, playing the same youtube video on chromium. What could be causing the bad audio quality in ghaf?

I couldn't launch Gala app, neither from command line. Other apps launch. Need to check still if this is specific to this PR or just inherited from the mainline.

[josa41]

Its hard to say what is causing the glitches in the sound but Pulseaudio is known of not being really resource friendly and playback over a network connection from one vm to another is not ideal either. I could tweak the latency settings of Qemu-pulseaudio backend but i guess we are moving to pipewire anyway at some point so I don't see too much point spending the time playing with pulseaudio.
Gala app was not touched (to my knowledge) in this pr. In my build Gala starts from the icon.

[leivos-unikie]

I noticed now that Mika had reported already in November bug about NixOS 23.11 causing Gala not to launch.
https://ssrc.atlassian.net/browse/SP-3335

@josa41, maybe you had built a version with NixOS 23.05?

[josa41]

Yes i had the older Nixos version. I updated and rebuild now, will test shortly.

[mikatammi]

Chromium app test stops working, it seems it's not possible to connect to chromium-vm:

==============================================================================
Test-Suites                                                                   
==============================================================================
Test-Suites.Bat-Tests :: To be executed only for BAT tests                    
==============================================================================
Ghaf version: 24.03
Nixos version: 23.11.20231210.781e2a9 (Tapir)
Test-Suites.Bat-Tests.Apps :: Testing launching applications                  
==============================================================================
Start Chromium on LenovoX1 :: Start Chromium in dedicated VM and v... Connecting to Ghaf Host
Connecting to NetVM
Connecting to gui-vm.ghaf

Starting chromium
Connecting to chromium-vm.ghaf
Killed processes: ['']
| FAIL |
ChannelException: ChannelException(2, 'Connect failed')
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[josa41]

Chromium app test stops working, it seems it's not possible to connect to chromium-vm:

Fixed, I accidentally cleaned too much of networking code for audio-vm and pulseaudio connection from host to audio-vm was lost in the process.

[leivos-unikie]

Tested these:

• All apps launch
• Audio can be controlled from gui-vm
• ci-test-automation set passes

In performance tests all 1-thread results are at normal level but there are some difference in multi-thread tests compared to ghaf mainline. Probably this is expected when new VMs are introduced.

[vilvo]

Works functionally, tested again with the latest changes. I see this as an intermediate iteration that enables audio-vm functionality and infrastucture. There are minor issues (pa audio glitches, variables for IP-addresses in audio-vm declaration) but I don't see them blocking. I think the main gain of this PR is that this enables an implemented baseline to discuss and redefine the next gen audio architecture for Ghaf.

[leivos-unikie]

Works functionally, tested again with the latest changes. I see this as an intermediate iteration that enables audio-vm functionality and infrastucture. There are minor issues (pa audio glitches, variables for IP-addresses in audio-vm declaration) but I don't see them blocking. I think the main gain of this PR is that this enables an implemented baseline to discuss and redefine the next gen audio architecture for Ghaf.

Yes, and as Jon earlier noted the playback speed of audio is out of sync. With a 4min youtube video I measured 16% faster playback time compared to external timer.

[leivos-unikie]

Integrated speaker/microphone not working. I didn't have now USB headset available but Milla had already tested with that USB headset audio/mic works.

• Audio/video playback speed. ok
• ci-test-automation, ok
• launching apps, ok
• performance, ok