Completely broken audio / constant buffer underruns on Fedora 41
Here's what happened to me a few minutes ago.
Any audio I was playing started crackling every 10 seconds or so. I couldn't stand it and couldn't understand what was going on.
It was reproducible in Firefox, Chrome, Audacious and I tried all the plugins - PA, PW, even ALSA. Nothing helped. I thought I was going crazy.
I ran pw-top and found something weird: there was a Firefox process generating two errors every 10 seconds or so, coinciding with the crackling. Yes, I had Firefox open, but it wasn't playing anything, it was paused playing a track on YouTube Audio. That was it.
I tried restarting PW and WP multiple times - it didn't help, the errors reappeared right away and kept piling up. I almost resorted to a system reboot and decided to shut down all instances of Firefox. That fixed the crackling immediately.
I just want to point out to developers that this situation should never happen. No userspace application should break PA, let alone break it after you restart it.
I'm running a fully updated Fedora 41 installation with Linux 6.12.6, Firefox 133.0.3 (the official Mozilla build), pipewire-1.2.7-1.fc41.x86_64 and wireplumber-0.5.5-2.fc41.x86_64. Everything is by default, I'm not using anything fancy. Output is alsa_output.pci-0000_c3_00.6.analog-stereo.
I won't debug it because I have no idea how to reproduce it. This is the first time it's happened. PW can apparently be broken by sending certain audio commands, which is really weird.
Feel free to close this report. It's basically a rant, or maybe such an issue is already being tracked, but I haven't looked for it, nor do I know how.