VirtualBox sound problem under Ubuntu

Question

As I recently upgraded to karmic I started to see the following stuff in the logs when I run VirtualBox:

Oct 30 18:14:34 apocalypse pulseaudio[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)io[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)
Oct 30 18:14:34 apocalypse pulseaudio[2813]: alsa-source.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original fragment settings. (Old: 65536/65536, New 1073676288/65532)

After a while the logs grow to large sizes and fill up all of my /var partition. In VirtualBox there is an option to choose between pulseaudio and alsa for sound, but it seems to have no effect. I am using virtualbox-3.0 packages, not the ose version. My system is up to date.

Solution

First please take a look at Anyone experiencing audio issues with VirtualBox on Linux and has a solution? for additional info.

As I note there, from 9.04->9.10 Ubuntu changed from ALSA to PulseAudio for the host sound support.

So you need to tell VirtualBox that your host audio is now PulseAudio - this seems for some reason to be a setting on EVERY virtual machine, so you'll need to change it on all of the ones you run. Changing it on one and not on another is probably a very bad idea.

You'll most probably have to make the change with no VM's running. Then stop and restart virtualbox. Hopefully at that point the messages to /var/log/ will cease.

Failing that, if audio works fine from the VMs and you're still seeing the messages, you might want to take a look at logrotate to manage the logfiles: http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/logrotate8.html

Hope this helps! If so please give the answer a thumbs-up. Thanks!
-pbr

Comments

[pbr]

Also... sorry it took so long to reply to this! I've been primarily looking at questions tagged "linux" - and this one's not tagged "linux". Now that I know there's a "karmic" tag I'll take a look at the rest of them as well.