Audio is severely distorted unless audio mixer is open #8194
Description
Qubes OS release
R4.2
Brief summary
Playing audio from Fedora (pulseaudio), Ubuntu (pipewire) or Windows (pulseaudio in stubdomain) is severely distorted.
Steps to reproduce
Try to play audio on R4.2, since it looks to be hardware-related, it's on HP EliteBook 1030, with 12th gen Intel CPU.
Expected behavior
Proper audio.
Actual behavior
Audio severely distorted, if mixes is not open. There are a few seconds of okay audio after closing the mixer.
Pulseaudio in dom0 logs this (once, unsure if related):
May 11 19:47:17 dom0 pulseaudio[5511]: ALSA woke us up to read new data from the device, but there was actually nothing to read.
May 11 19:47:17 dom0 pulseaudio[5511]: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_soc_skl_hda_dsp'. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers.
May 11 19:47:17 dom0 pulseaudio[5511]: We were woken up with POLLIN set -- however a subsequent snd_pcm_avail() returned 0 or another value < min_avail.
Additionally, when mixer is opened, pacat logs this:
Stream device alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.HiFi__hw_sofhdadsp_6__source resumed.Stream device alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.HiFi__hw_sofhdadsp_6__source resumed.
and few seconds after it's closed (when the sound breaks again):
Stream device alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.HiFi__hw_sofhdadsp_6__source suspended.Stream device alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.HiFi__hw_sofhdadsp_6__source suspended.
But note the above is about alsa_input, while playback is about alsa_output.
For a VM with Pipewire, there is some more logs:
Pipewire (in Ubuntu) logs a lot of mod.qubes-audio: Underrun: asked to read 8192 bytes, but only 0 available and pacat log is full of Stream uncork (without matching cork).