[24.04] ALL audio devices have disappeared!

[IanW]

Running Kubuntu 24.04. It was fine this morning.
Ran aptitude safe-upgrade just now, and it seems to have removed all audio devices, both input and output.
Looking at /var/cache/apt/archives shows a recent update to wireplumber.
This is persistent over both soft & hard reboots.

[corradoventu]

On Ubuntu (not Kubuntu) i have no problem with audio and see:
corrado@corrado-n4-nn-0125:~$ apt changelog wireplumber
wireplumber (0.4.17-1ubuntu1) noble; urgency=medium
* Add patch to add support for snap permissions (LP: #1995707)
-- Sergio Costas <sergio.costas@canonical.com> Wed, 24 Jan 2024 12:54:23 -0500

[IanW]

I see the same.
Whatever caused my problem, it hit the repos between 05:00 UTC & 17:00 UTC yesterday (Thursday 25th Jan, 2024)

[Ubunterrific]

Been chasing this one down myself last night!
I've isolated the packages and it's definitely from the upgrade on noble of only wireplumber and libwireplumber-0.4-0 (0.4.17-1 to 0.4.17-1ubuntu1) yesterday.

For anyone afflicted, you can grab and manually install the 2 older, working debs with (dpkg or otherwise) from launchpad here (at the bottom): https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source...build/27575873, then log out and back in (or restart wireplumber) and have your sound devices back. These packages will upgrade when you upgrade, unless you intervene.

It's an odd bug though because the problem of no audio devices is happening just on my custom kernels and actually works fine on the supplied kernel 6.6.0-14 (hence perhaps not everyone will experience it. Glad it's not just me!), so obviously something now needed is missing and I'll need to figure out what and put it in the config next build.
I wonder if wireplumber might be checking for permissions incorrectly or via a method that not every setup can accommodate or something. Installing snapd didn't seem to help.

Will be digging further today, but hopefully someone finds the specific problem shortly. Hope this helps!

[IanW]

That got it, except that I had to downgrade gir1.2-wp-0.4 as well.

I've pinned all 3 until I'm sure there's a fix available.

Thanks for the detective work, I'll mark the thread as [SOLVED] for others to find.

[Ubunterrific]

It's a crafty blighter! I've been clearing/resetting configs and hokeycokeying pulse and alsa but made some discoveries.

0.4.17-1 (wireplumber and libwireplumber-0.4-0) work, but also a (newer) 2 week old latest version deb I found ofversion 0.4.81 (and libwireplumber-0.5.0) work fine. Problem seems limited to just this particular new version for noble (which had me wondering if the problem was with how it was built - lto problem? Nothing jumps out at me looking at wireplumber's commit history anyways.)
As soon as you install them and restart wireplumber with

systemctl --user restart wireplumber*.service

you get your audio devices back.

There's a warning coming up often of:

pipewire-pulse[644]: default: snap_get_audio_permissions: failed to get the AppArmor info.

but that's pipewire-specific and that began appearing when pipewire got the code for container permission stuff, this is wireplumber now getting the same treatment. I can't think of anything to get rid of this warning at the moment (and it appears even on 'good' wireplumber versions so incidental), it's also there whether apparmor is installed and running or uninstalled, and I've no ideas about setting up an appropriate profile for it (hopefully coming for ubuntu noble?).

This one may be more useful:

wireplumber[5211]: GetManagedObjects() failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner

I'm working under the assumption that the 6.6.0-14 noble kernel isn't having any trouble with 0.4.17-1ubuntu1 because of something to do with CONFIG_SECURITY_APPARMOR_RESTRICT_USERNS=y. I can't seem to find any discussion on this kconfig option or if it's been deprecated for kernel 6.7 onwards (or code was merged into another option or something), but this option isn't available to be selectable on my 6.7, 6.8rc1 NOR the latest ubuntu mainline kernel I checked.

There was a reddit post very recently with same issue and a few hours ago, someone has also narrowed it down to being kernel + apparmor related. (On the right lines!)

[#&thj^%]

Actually I filed against apparmor for a different application here:https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2493479

Sounds like you will need to create a apparmor profile for your use.

[jbicha]

Could someone affected by this issue with standard Ubuntu file a bug using

ubuntu-bug

then choose a sound or audio problem.

I'm not interested in a bug for this issue if it only shows when using a non-default kernel though.

We are preparing a security update to backport these pipewire & wireplumber changes to Mantic. Perhaps Jammy too.

[IanW]

Could someone affected by this issue with standard Ubuntu file a bug using

ubuntu-bug

then choose a sound or audio problem.

I'm not interested in a bug for this issue if it only shows when using a non-default kernel though.

We are preparing a security update to backport these pipewire & wireplumber changes to Mantic. Perhaps Jammy too.

It shouldn't be me then, I've been using mainline kernels.

[jbicha]

There is a fix in progress:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source...1.0.1-1ubuntu3