Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound

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Subject: Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound
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I was hoping to submit a few bugs, but ${LIFE} keeps me sufficiently
busy these days. ;-)

If I can open up some spare time, I'll take a deeper look. Just been
really low priority for me, and the lack of bug reports shows.

I suspect a couple HardenedBSD features might be getting in the way,
most notably our notion of untrusted kernel modules. I need to do some
extra debugging (that FreeBSD users would normally not have to do)
beforehand so I don't submit a bug report not applicable to FreeBSD.

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

On Mon, Jul 20, 2026 at 11:21:47AM -0700, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> y'all!
>=20
> please file bugs. like, whenever i have an audio problem i fire off a
> bug and then i poke christos on IRC and we figure it out.
>=20
> I have like 11 laptops running freebsd-16 dating back to a T420 and
> early macbook air laptops. I haven't got anything earlier as they
> start being i386 and not amd64.
> Audio works on all of them just fine.
>=20
>=20
> -adrian
>=20
> On Mon, 20 Jul 2026 at 07:01, Shawn Webb <[email protected]> wro=
te:
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 20, 2026 at 02:04:25AM +0200, vermaden wrote:
> > > Hi.
> > >
> > > For a start lets define some TERMS. I use UPPERCASE not to shout - bu=
t to underline a part of the sentence that is needed to be underlined - thi=
s is plain email - I do not have Bold/Underscore/Italic options - keep that=
 in mind - now - to the core of the issue ...
> > >
> > > I always considered FreeBSD OSS audio/sound subsystem superior to all=
 ALSA/PulseAudio/PipeWire and other dramas from the Linux world ... but not=
 anymore.
> > >
> > > Somewhere between 14.3-RELEASE and 14.4-RELEASE things begin to get b=
roken - I thought that upgrade to latest and greatest 15.1-RELEASE would so=
lve my issues - as there were LOTS of sound/audio related things.
> > >
> > > I will not even start about PITA syntax of mixer(1) which went into t=
his:
> > >
> > > % mixer -f ${DEV} vol.volume=3D+0.05
> > >
> > > ... from MUCH MORE friendly syntax.
> > >
> > > But these random 'boozing' sounds are just unacceptable ... and I can=
 not even tell where they came from ... is it OSS problem? Is is PulseAudio=
 problem? Something in between? Because there is NOTHING in the logs for au=
dio.
> > >
> > > Its also possible to get that file from my personal 'mediafire.com' a=
ccount here:
> > > - https://mediafire.com/file/jw3cpk8g77rvks2/freebsd-tragic-audio-sou=
nd.mp4/file
> > >
> > > ... and its not some fancy laptop from yesterday ... its a ThinkPad T=
480 from 2018 for fuck sake - hardware like that used to run smooth as Carl=
os Sainz 'smooth operator' in Singapore GP ... but not anymore.
> > >
> > > I do not even know what to add here ... its a message send our of des=
pair ... as newer releases only made these things worse ... I have been rep=
eating this over and over again - but its again probably the issue that 'to=
o less' FreeBSD developers use FreeBSD as their daily driver/desktop/laptop=
 system.
> > >
> > > Sorry to disappoint.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > The only downside is when I want to make sure the YouTube link I'm
> > about to post in random places is really the right one from an audio
> > perspective.
> >
> > Perhaps some day I'll care enough about the problem to actually dig
> > in. But for now, I've got higher priority items on my list to tackle.
> > I just thought I'd provide another anectodal data point with this
> > email.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > --
> > 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=
/03A4CBEBB82EA5A67D9F3853FF2E67A277F8E1FA.pub.asc

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