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Aaron44126
Contributor
Contributor
‎07-01-2010 06:43 AM

polkitd eats my CPU in Ubuntu 10.04 running on Workstation 7.1... oh, and no audio

After upgrading to VMware Workstation 7.1 (from 7.0.1), and upgrading VMware Tools to the current version, I've got this trouble in my Ubuntu 10.04 guests...

  • No audio in the guest. It acts like it can't find a sound card.

  • polkitd is gobbling the CPU. dbus-daemon is also high usage.

By the way, running on a Windows 7 64-bit host.

I've looked around for other reports of this problem, but I've come up mostly empty. (I've found a couple of other complaints about the issue but no solutions.) I'm surprised, as I've easily reproduced this on two separate Ubuntu 10.04 guests, and all it took was the upgrade of VMware Tools to cause this to happen.

I can solve the CPU gobbling issue by killing pulseaudio. Still got no sound, though.

Anyone else seen this? Any ideas?

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2 Replies
Aaron44126
Contributor
Contributor
‎07-01-2010 06:47 AM

Some additional information. This gets repeated over and over in the syslog (with different process IDs):

Jul  1 09:45:51 KEI-VM-YAC rtkit-daemon[1273]: Sucessfully made thread 17868 of process 17868 (n/a) owned by '1000' high priority at nice level -11.
Jul  1 09:45:51 KEI-VM-YAC rtkit-daemon[1273]: Supervising 1 threads of 1 processes of 1 users.
Jul  1 09:45:51 KEI-VM-YAC pulseaudio[17868]: main.c: Daemon startup without any loaded modules, refusing to work.
Jul  1 09:45:51 KEI-VM-YAC pulseaudio[17866]: main.c: Daemon startup failed.

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basich
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-03-2011 07:27 PM

What finally worked for me was to:

cd /etc/pulse

something renamed default.pa to default.pal.old.0 (my bet is it was vmware tools)

I renamed this back to default.pa and everything is working again.

Hope this helps.

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