Setting up an audio VM

OK, I did the install…except that it said there was nothing to do! In other words they’re already installed. I fired up sys-audio and did a dnf-list to confirm that.

OK, that’s just weird.

The next thing I try is repeating the whole thing in fedora-36-minimal

OK. Downloaded fedora-36-minimal. Cloned it to fed36m-audio (that way I keep a pristine copy of the template around). I deactivated the cacher.

I then ran this salt script:

tmpl-{{namestem}}-base-update:
        cmd.run:
        - name: 'sudo dnf update'

tmpl-{{namestem}}-installs:
    pkg.installed:
    - install_recommends: True
    - pkgs:
        - qubes-core-agent-passwordless-root
        - alsa-plugins-pulseaudio
        - alsa-utils
        - pulseaudio-utils
        - pipewire-utils
        - webrtc-audio-processing
        - xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin
        - pavucontrol
        - pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
        - pulseaudio-qubes
        - qubes-core-admin-client
        - pciutils

tmpl-{{namestem}}-daemon:
    pkg.installed:
    - install_recommends: True
    - pkgs:
        - qubes-audio-daemon

And…the SAME result. Sound goes into sys-audio…nothing comes out of the speakers. Pavucontrol shows bouncing sound levels like it’s getting the signal from the source VM, and sending it on, but again, it doesn’t seem to see the output device.

sudo lspci -k -v result is that it finds the controller, as before

aplay -l no soundcards found...

qvm-start-daemon --all --watch tells me another GUI daemon process is already running.

First things first…am I forgetting something that needed to go into the template?

Not that I’m aware of.

Why don’t you diff dom0 and audio template with meld?

Export both list, put them somewhere where Meld is installed, and it would show you if some package is missing:

$ sudo dnf repoquery --qf ‘%{name}’ --installed | grep -v – ‘-debuginfo$’ | grep -v ‘^(kernel-modules|kernel|kernel-core|kernel-devel)$’ > pkgs_a.lst

But I still suspect on alsa-sof as said above…

You can’t even imagine what I’ve been through in order to be able to pasthrough audio device to sys-audio…

OK let me pursue alsa-sof. Except that I have no idea what to do. I simply didn’t understand the post you quoted on that.

Do I do a dnf-remove on something? doing a dnf list installed on template and dom0 shows it is on dom0 not the template. Am I supposed to install something else in its place? Or do something on the template?

As I said, this is purely guessing on that. So, if alsa-sof-firmware is installed in dom- and not in the template, then I’d install it in a template if it’s not there too, and vice versa.

Then I’d run those two commands in template (modprobe - r... and modprobe....

On a github link above I noticed the message from 8 days ago

Just an update, that the fixes pull request was merged into Linux 6.1-rc5, so the commit is in Linus’ master branch.
The two qcom commits were already backported to the stable series (at least contains them 6.0.9), so maybe somebody needs to ask for a stable backport for the commit at hand?

OK, adding it to the template makes sense…I don’t know how I got the impression you thought it should be removed from dom0.

However…doing so didn’t actually help.

modprobe…well, that mucks with the kernel and I am really am way outside my knowledge doing that. I have no idea what parameters to put into those two commands.

So, is there a straight forward guide anywhere how to make all this work in R4.1?

I would love to have bluetooth sound working via sys-audio, but failed to find a guide that is straight forward, clear and up-to-date. Nor documentation in both Qubes OS Docs, nor Community part.

So, I would really appreciate a final version for this task if somebody can summarize everything in a reliable way. I will be a great help for everyone.

1 Like

I heartily agree.

All I can find dealing with sys-audio for either debian or fedoria are threads that start with instructions missing a key detail, then twenty replies down someone announces that they were missing such-and-such package and that is what they needed to get it working on their system.

Also, I dread the day when this becomes part of the default install. It is broken on far too many peoples’ systems, including mine–I never got it to work and I’m not even trying to do bluetooth, I just want to listen to music.

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Yes, exactly. As there are so many people who has sys-audio up and running - can someone please provide a full guide from the start to be finish?
The great post of @hamenarin can be used as a basis, at least it has some step-by-step logic.

@enmus , @fepitre guys, do you still have sys-audio with no issues?

Out of the blue, totally new property might prevent you from hearing sound from sys-audio.

admin.vm.property.Get +stubdom_xid sys-audio @tag:audiovm-sys-audio allow target=dom0