Pipewire audio in Fedora container

Question

Since Fedora 34, pulseaudio was replaced with pipewire. I used a pulseaudio socket to get sound from containers, which was the most secure way. So, I would like now to set pipewire to handle audio in container, but I can't find the way...

I'm trying the simplest way right now, sharing snd device, without socket:

Launch fedora 34 container:

podman run -it --device /dev/snd fedora

Create user and add it to audio group:

useradd usertest -u 1000 -m -p ''

usermod -aG audio usertest

Install paquages:

dnf -y install pipewire alsa-utils pulseaudio-utils

systemctl start --user pipewire-pulse.service

When I start it, there is a DBUS error, because DBUS isn't running on container

And with user, pactl info returns this error:

Connection failure: Connection refused
pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

Or would it be possible to get something similar to a pulseaudio socket with pipewire?

Answer 1

I guess you don't need to run the full-fledged pipewire server in a container, you just need to have it installed. It contains client-side libs you'll need. If you have a Pipewire server running on your host already, we just need to connect to it from the container.

I needed exactly what you wanted (to run software inside of container that will be able to play sound through the host soundcard), and here's how I've done it - https://stackoverflow.com/a/75775875/1321921

Few small diffs to your setup:

• I was using docker, not podman
• for my test, I used alpine docker image, not the fedora one

I tried it out with fedora docker image - and it worked just fine:

1. make sure to pass a Pipewire socket file from your host to your container. In docker it is done like this -v /run/user/1000/pipewire-0:/tmp/pipewire-0
2. make sure to set the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR variable inside the container to point to the place where you mounted pipewire socket file (-e XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp)
3. within the container to install pipewire (which is both client and server, but we're only going to use client part of it) and pipewire-alsa which introduces a virtual ALSA device, for ALSA-only software

docker run -it -v /run/user/1000/pipewire-0:/tmp/pipewire-0 -e XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp --rm fedora /bin/sh
yum install pipewire pipewire-alsa alsa-utils
speaker-test
# you should hear a sound here

The only thing I don't like is that in Fedora, the pipewire package brings a lot of hard dependencies with it. That didn't happen to Alpine. Probably there's another way exist, to have pipewire client side only installed to Fedora, without bringing all that clutter, but still.