Re: gnome-sdk update and TODOs

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On fre, 2014-12-12 at 17:42 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-12-12 at 17:08 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On fre, 2014-11-28 at 16:07 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > > * Audio
> > >
> > >  There is no audio support atm. Neither alsa libs, not device nodes.
> > >  I think the best approach is to use pulseaudio, but this needs
> > >  careful consideration in terms of ABI/IPC compat, performance,
> > >  latency, etc.
> >
> > Today I looked at audio via pulseaudio. This is kind of tricky, it seems
> > to me like the pulseaudio protocol follows the X11 style permissions
> > method. I.e. if you're able to authenticate to the daemon you have full
> > privs, including loading modules into the daemon.
> >
> > Furthermore, the "normal" mode of using shared memory to send audio
> > relies on a single global /dev/shm, which breaks with any kind of
> > containerization and allows any client to read any other clients data.
> >
> > I don't see why theoretically pulseaudio couldn't allow shared memory
> > buffers in a contained mode, via e.g. fd passing of the shared memory
> > instead of a shared namespace. However, anything like this involves
> > upstream changes to the protocol. For now i'm disabling shared memory
> > in the app, which is not ideal but at least allows apps to play sounds.
>
> Lennart did mention that PulseAudio could make use of kdbus for passing
> buffers around, and I guess that Wim's "PulseVideo" (for the lack of a
> better name) could also make use of it.
>
> Finer permissions are necessary in any case. You can probably allow any
> app to play sound, but you might not want to allow microphone access to
> most applications.

Yeah, this level of permissions will need some drastic changes to the
pulseaudio client handling. Perhaps it is possible to do while keeping
the protocol, not sure about that. But in general, a kdbus version would
be pretty nice as this would remove the issues around having to
share /dev/shm with the host.