Ther rtkit problem is traced here https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=850855

I added Felipe to CC, because this is directed more to him: in the Debian bug you said that "pulseaudio should not hang when rtkit cannot start". I'm not sure I agree. If pulseaudio hangs, I believe it means that D-Bus thinks that rtkit is available, but starting it takes a long time for some strange reason. If rtkit is simply not installed, I think D-Bus will error out immediately. It seems reasonable to assume that if rtkit is installed, it can be started.

I think it's fine if someone writes a patch to make pulseaudio handle weird rtkit problems better, but I don't think this is strictly speaking a pulseaudio bug.

I think I have traced the problem.

Rtkit fails to start because PrivateTmp= conflicts with symlinks in /var. This is a bug in systemd (but I have not filed it yet).

DBus apparently never stops trying to start it, until the timeout is reached (by default 25 seconds). Thus, one would expect to have pulseaudio have a delayed start of 25 seconds. Not so, because pa_raise_priority:

    if (set_nice(nice_level) >= 0) {
        pa_log_info("Successfully gained nice level %i.", nice_level);
        return 0;
    }

    for (n = nice_level+1; n < 0; n++)
        if (set_nice(n) >= 0) {
            pa_log_info("Successfully acquired nice level %i, which is lower than the requested %i.", n, nice_level);
            return 0;
        }

If set_nice fails, pulseaudio will try successively higher nice levels until it reaches 0 (probably assuming it was started with 0 niceness). nice_level is by default -11, so there would be 11 calls to set_nice => 11*25 = 4:35 minutes.

BogDan Vatra, if you wait more than 5 minutes, does pulseaudio eventually start? If this hypothesis is confirmed, then the solution would be to either:

1. Lower the timeout
2. detect that rtkit did not work the first time because dbus could not start rtkit, and do not try to contact it again in successive retries.

@Felipe Sateler: yes, it starts.

IMHO set_nice should return a different ERROR code if it can't connect to rtkit. Tih way you can skip the "for (n = nice_level+1; n < 0; n++)"

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