Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound

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Subject: Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound
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On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 01:26:17AM +0300, Christos Margiolis wrote:
> On Mon Jul 20, 2026 at 4:59 PM EEST, Shawn Webb wrote:
> > I've been experiencing audio issues as well since the recent work
> > started a little while ago (a year? two years? my chronological memory
> > isn't the best.)
> >
> > It's broken bad enough that I now don't use audio on my systems at
> > all. I haven't filed any bug reports, though, because it just hasn't
> > been a priority for me. I've got tons of other systems where audio
> > works fine and it's not really a bother to use those instead of my
> > fbsd/hbsd systems.
>=20
> Can you mention one example of "bad enough"? I've been lurking this
> thread to find concrete problems to work on and I only see stuff like
> this.

LibreWolf just does not play audio at all now. When I open
pavucontrol with a video/audio tab open and playing, LibreWolf isn't
even listed in the "Playback" tab. It used to prior to the sound
system overhaul.

Audio recording device issues as well. No matter what, I cannot get my
wireless (via non-BT USB wireless dongle) headphone's microphone to
work with video conferencing websites (in LibreWolf). I haven't tried
anything with Chromium, though I suppose I could add that to the list
of things to try.

With me having zero experience in the audio stack, I'm not entirely
sure where to start debugging--especially given the number of moving
components. Is this a PulseAudio problem? Is this a kernel problem? Is
this because we've hardened certain interfaces in HardenedBSD, and the
audio stack could be impacted (unintentionally, of course)?

I don't feel comfortable asking others to do that initial debugging
work (since I don't feel entitled to dictate other's priorities and
time). I don't know how well my issue can be reproduced. The zfs
datasets for this laptop date back to 2013-ish, so my issues could
also be due to mysterious old cruft surviving 13 years across multiple
laptops.

If I can find some spare time, I'll try to dig in. What would be
helpful is some sort of "get started debugging the audio stack(s)"
sort of guide. I remember seeing the audio stack receiving some
coverage in the FreeBSD Journal, perhaps that could be my starting
point.

Thanks,

--=20
Shawn Webb
Cofounder / Security Engineer
HardenedBSD

Signal Username:  shawn_webb.74
Tor-ified Signal: +1 (719) 756-1197 / activist_opsec.27
https://git.hardenedbsd.org/hardenedbsd/pubkeys/-/raw/master/Shawn_Webb/03A=
4CBEBB82EA5A67D9F3853FF2E67A277F8E1FA.pub.asc

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