pulseaudio assertion, crashes other applications (mpv, OBS, ...)

[pocock]

I've noticed that some applications, including mpv and OBS Studio, are intermittently crashing with an assertion from PulseAudio

If you run applications from a terminal window then you will probably see the assertion text in the window when the application crashes.  If you are running any applications from the menu or launcher and they are crashing unexpectedly then it is a good idea to try running them from the console to observe stdout and stderr.  You can also use journalctl to search for assertions like this.

Here is the error:

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Assertion 're->data || re->memblock' failed at pulsecore/pstream.c:862, function do_read(). Aborting.
Aborted


I opened bug report #1060 in the PulseAudio bug tracker.

Searching for this assertion in the search engines I found people have similar problems on ARM64.  I haven't seen it on x86.

[pocock]

This can be worked around by editing /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and setting this parameter:

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enable-shm = no