snd_pcm_writei() is meant to block block until all samples are written,
but apparently in some situations it can block for much longer, prehaps
even a infinite time, in the case of virtual machine FifoCI runs in.
Because it grabed a mutex before blocking, it could also block the
Clear() call for an infinite length of time, blocking dolphin's emu
thread.
snd_pcm_writei() also takes 10-15 seconds if you run dolphin under GDB
and can randomly take 5 or so seconds during normal usage.
By moving all the pause code to the ALSA thread, Clear() no-longer
blocks and everyone keeps their sanity.
When the emulation is paused and the ALSA backend is used, make the audio
thread wait on a condition variable instead of busy-waiting. This commit
fixes bug #7729
Since the ALSA API is not thread-safe, calls to snd_pcm_drop() and snd_pcm_prepare()
in AlsaSound::Clear() are protected by the same mutex as the condition variable in AlsaSound::SoundLoop()
to make sure that we do not call these functions while a call to
snd_pcm_writei() is ongoing.
This fixes a race condition:
Before this commit, there was a race condition when starting a game:
Core::EmuThread(), after having started (but not necessarily completed)
the initialization of the audio thread, calls Core::SetState() which calls
CCPU::EnableStepping(), which in turns calls AudioCommon::ClearAudioBuffer().
This means that SoundStream::Clear() can be called before
AlsaSound::AlsaInit() has completed.
If the selected audio backend fails to Start() (which could happen for
example if there is no audio device), we currently still use the backend
anyway. This can lead to crashes on some platforms (such as Windows) and
is outright wrong anyway.
This commit fallbacks to the Null audio backend if the selected backend
couldn't be started.
This fixes bug #6001
We had to lock audiocommon with the old asynchron HLE audio emulation,
now our Mixer is just a plain FIFO which may underrun.
Of course, this will stutter, but underruning the audio backend is likely worse.
Markus Wick