wireplumber

[colemickens]

Project description
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/wireplumber

"Session / policy manager implementation for PipeWire"

I have a WIP for this.

It's blocked on these two things:

• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/wireplumber/-/issues/20 (wireplumber build issue)

• cmake: output cpptoml.pc for pkg-config discoverability skystrife/cpptoml#124 (PR so that cpptoml outputs pkg-config files)

• WIP wireplumber: https://github.com/colemickens/nixcfg/blob/e552bb209e9fc9e09e71ba1ca7f5067cb5a010fc/pkgs/wireplumber/default.nix

• WIP cpptoml: https://github.com/colemickens/nixcfg/blob/e552bb209e9fc9e09e71ba1ca7f5067cb5a010fc/pkgs/cpptoml/default.nix

Metadata

• homepage URL: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/wireplumber
• source URL: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/wireplumber
• license: MIT
• platforms: linux

[eadwu]

Is it even necessary? I don't think I saw any differences when compared to pipewire's internal session manager. At least back when I used wireplumber, it was at least more stable but compared to the current internal manager it's far worse.

Last I checked, I couldn't even manage to get bluetooth working in wireplumber (2020-10-22) in which case I got rid of it altogether afterwards.

[colemickens]

pipewire's internal session manager

ah, pardon my ignorance, but I don't know what this is and when I google that phrase I just find wireplumber (I'll keep looking).

It's entirely possible this isn't needed or is redundant, I just don't really know. I was just looking for something to visually wire up sources and sinks, which I thought was possible with pipewire.

[colemickens]

Found this: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/category/pipewire/

Currently this is a simple sample session manager that Wim created himself, but we also have a more advanced session manager called Wireplumber being developed by Collabora, which they developed for use in automotive Linux usecases, but which we will probably be moving to over time also for the desktop.

[eadwu]

The internal session manager is just referring to pipewire-media-session if I haven't remembered incorrectly.

You're looking for JACK utilities, I don't think wireplumber provides a GUI either.

[colemickens]

I packed this anyway and have it building, I'll send it at some point, until then it's here: https://github.com/colemickens/nixcfg/blob/689413b38a596f9ac88984f4d797ef6cc8a29285/pkgs/wireplumber/default.nix

In the meantime, and related to @eadwu's hint, now that JACK-y things seem to be working better, I can indeed do some visual input/output routing in qjackctl.

[minijackson]

For those like me who were confused about the difference between WirePlumber and the default pipewire-media-session:

PipeWire upstream has a very limited example session manager. It serves as a good example for building new ones and has some functionality there for basic desktop use cases and testing, but it goes no further than that. WirePlumber serves as a replacement for this example and additionally provides a framework for building custom session managers.

The main goal of WirePlumber as a session manager is obviously to watch for streams from applications and make sure that they get linked to the appropriate device or peer application according to the rules of the use case that it implements.

Source

I think it is still desirable to have this packaged in nixpkgs in the long term, although I personally have no use for it right now (just very curious).

[jansol]

When this gets packaged it should be integrated in the pipewire NixOS module alongside the current pipewire-media-session. Haven't bothered looking into it yet since there hasn't been a release in ages and I'm fairly sure the previous release doesn't work with the current pipewire.

And it is definitely desirable to package this, since wireplumber supports scripting for smart automatic routing in fancier setups that aren't served sufficiently with only a single default card for input and output respectively. So essentially everyone who would use the pro audio profile on their main soundcard.

Checking on the releases page, looks like there is a 0.4.0 release coming up soon. I'll look into it once that lands (unless someone beats me to it)..

[GabTheBab]

It seems 0.4.0 is here and highly compatible with the current pipewire versions, could be a good time to check this issue out again.

[jakobrs]

I have something that works here. I have a few notes:

• By default, it will use $out/etc/wireplumber as its "config dir", $out/share/wireplumber as its "data dir" and $out/lib/wireplumber-0.4 as its "module dir". These can be overridden using the WIREPLUMBER_CONFIG_DIR, WIREPLUMBER_DATA_DIR and WIREPLUMBER_MODULE_DIR environment variables. I think we can leave the defaults as-is, and override these variables in the systemd unit. This would allow one to run ./result/bin/wireplumber without setting anything up and have it use the default configuration.
• /etc/wireplumber contains four .conf files, but these are separate example configurations (they don't depend on each other)
• List of environment variables that change the behaviour of WirePlumber
  • WIREPLUMBER_DEBUG (debug level, default is 2 and can be changed in the configuration file)
  • WIREPLUMBER_NO_PW_LOG (Don't replace PipeWire's logging system with WirePlumber's (I think))
  • WIREPLUMBER_MODULE_DIR (sets module directory, used for searching for modules)
  • WIREPLUMBER_CONFIG_DIR (sets config directory, used for loading configuration files and scripts (in scripts subdirectory)
  • WIREPLUMBER_DATA_DIR (sets data directory, also used for finding scripts (in scripts subdirectory) (if $WIREPLUMBER_CONFIG_DIR/scripts didn't contain the file), but nothing else.
  • WPIPC_DEBUG (wpipc debug level)
    • I'm guessing wpipc is a wireplumber inter-process communication thing
  • wpipc sets a variable called runtime_dir to the first one of these that exists:
    • PIPEWIRE_RUNTIME_DIR
    • XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
    • HOME
    • USERPROFILE
    • There's a fifth case that I don't understand but it looks like it's reading the runtime directory from a socket

I can create a pull request if someone else wants to be the maintainer.

[jakobrs]

If anyone wants to try out WirePlumber, the steps are as below:

1. Build the WirePlumber package
2. Copy the etc and share directories to somewhere writable: cp result/etc result/share ./ -r
   • You can alternatively copy result/etc/wireplumber and result/share/wireplumber into somewhere you can write to, you don't need to copy the entire etc directory
3. Make the new etc and share directories writable using chmod: chmod 755 ./etc ./share -R
4. Set the config and data dirs: export WIREPLUMBER_CONFIG_DIR="$PWD/etc/wireplumber" WIREPLUMBER_DATA_DIR="$PWD/share/wireplumber"
5. Stop pipewire-media-session: systemctl stop --user pipewire-media-session
6. Launch WirePlumber: result/bin/wireplumber [-c configfile]
   • Default configfile is $WIREPLUMBER_CONFIG_DIR/wireplumber.conf

You don't need to modify any existing PipeWire configuration to try out WirePlumber.

You can then e.g. try changing the volume with result/bin/wpctl or launching scripts with result/bin/wpexec.

[jakobrs]

There's a new release of WirePlumber, version 1.4.2. I've updated my nur package here.

[arcnmx]

fwiw I just migrated from pipewire-media-session to wireplumber by writing a module. It was a little complicated by the fact that the only way to configure wireplumber right now is to write lua scripts that generate the desired configuration json data (lua is used purely as a preprocessor so is kind of unnecessary, but is also the only way to pass data to it), so I had to include a nix attrs toLuaTable serializer.

[bryanasdev000]

Related to #102547

[jansol]

@arcnmx would you mind getting that module into nixpkgs now that upstream pipewire is nudging people more towards wireplumber? See also: #142865 . If not, and if that is alright with you, I can try to get it mangled into a shape that can be merged.

I tried copying your module into my local nixpkgs tree on top of that PR, but ran into a problem:

The option `services.pipewire.wireplumber.access.rules.<name>.matches.*.*.subject' is used but not defined.

(I moved it from services.wireplumber to services.pipewire.wireplumber, I think this sort of hierarchy makes more sense.)

In lieu of this we should probably hide or do away with the enable options for the individual session managers and instead enable them based on a services.pipewire.sessionManager enum.