On Thu, Jul 09, 2026 at 03:22:05PM +0200, Markus Armbruster wrote: > Cc: mainainters for "Overall Audio backends" > Peter Maydell <[email protected]> writes: > > > On Thu, 9 Jul 2026 at 12:44, Markus Armbruster <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> I stumbled over ARM machine musicpal, PPC machines pegasos1, pegasos2, > >> and MIPS machine fuloong2e crashes. > >> > >> I run them like this: > >> > >> $ qemu-system-aarch64 -M musicpal -nodefaults -S -display none -monitor > >> stdio > > > >> Died when device_set_realized() tried to propagate a "no default audio > >> driver available" error to &error_abort. > > > > Is this something we want to have be a possibility the devices > > have to cope with? Can we have the "ignores all audio data" > > backend be always available instead? > > There's plenty of precedence for /dev/null-like backends. > > > Otherwise every audio device needs to cope with "there is no > > audio backend available" and implement "do nothing with the > > audio data" itself. > > Yes.
We've got a bit of tension between "no defaults" and "builtin audio devices" here. Cnosider if I had instead done qemu-system-x86_64 -M pc -device ac97 -nodefaults It is not unreasonable to expect to see an error because you asked explicitly for 'ac97' and forgot to wire up the required audio backend, and asked to NOT have any defaults. But with your 'musicpal' machine example, you never asked for the frontend device, so you should be forgiven for also not asking for a audio backend. If we guarantee a /dev/null audio backend always exists, we help the second case but degrade the first case So we must pick the lesser evil :-( With regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com ~~ https://hachyderm.io/@berrange :| |: https://libvirt.org ~~ https://entangle-photo.org :| |: https://pixelfed.art/berrange ~~ https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
