sndioctl only as root

[stanl]

According to the 6.7 upgrade faq:

regular users must use the sndioctl(1) utility in place of mixerctl(1) to adjust the volume

And man 8 mixerctl:

Common controls should be adjusted at runtime using sndioctl (1), which is intended for every day use and requires no superuser privileges.

But when I run:

sndioctl output.level=0.5

I get:

Default: can't open control device

and have to run the command using doas.

I've read both the sndioctl and mixerctl man pages and have no idea where to go from here. Any assistance will be appreciated.

Thanks

[victorvas]

Add yourself to staff and operator groups.

[stanl]

I was already in staff. I added myself to operator and everything works fine.
Thanks very much.

[jggimi]

I don't need the operator group to use sndioctl(1). How have you provisioned sndiod(8)? Non-default? Disabled?

sndioctl(1) will use the default sndio(7) device exposed by sndiod(8) unless overridden by -f device or setting the $AUDIODEVICE environment variable.

[stanl]

jggimi - I wouldn't even begin to know how to provision sndiod, altho I would appreciate a hint.
I will say that I spent most of yesterday working with mpd and ncmpcpp trying to convince it that there really was a ~/Music directory and it did contain files. But all i touched were those 2 config files. Is it possible I messed something up there?

I think I found it. In ~/.mpdconf in the audio output section for sndio I changed mixer_type from hardware to software. Now it works running mpv but not with ncmpcpp (I guess because ncmpcpp has it's own way of adjusting volume).

[jggimi]

Audio applications that use the sndio(7) library don't need access to audio hardware (/dev/audio0, /dev/audio1, ...). By default, OpenBSD runs the sndiod(8) sound server (with no provisioning options) in order to serve this hardware to these audio applications. Device names used in sndio(7) are not device files found in /dev, and so are not managed by user/group. With a default configuraiton, sndiod(8) will automatically "own" all your audio devices and dole them out to sndio applications when requested.

There are exceptions. 1) Non-default configurations of sndiod or sndiod not running, and 2) two different users attempting to use the same audio device at the same time.

If the default audio device is requested by an application, the sndio(7) library will first attempt to connect with snd/0, the first device managed by sndiod(8). If the device is not available through sndiod(8), the library will then try to connect to the raw audio device -- rsnd/0. This will then translate into access to the appropriate device special file such as /dev/audio0. These device special files are owner:group root:_sndiop, and have no world access, so I'm not clear why adding your userid to the operator group made a difference. I could guess that there was a reboot, under the assumption that sndiod was not running or the audio device was in use by another userid.

If you have multiple users trying to use the same device, you must share sndio(7) cookies as noted in the AUTHENTICATION section of the sndio(7) man page.

You can check your sndiod(8) provisioning with $ grep sndiod /etc/rc.conf*. The default is without options, so a default configuration would be an empty sndiod_flags= field. You can check to see if sndiod(8) is running with $ pgrep -lf sndiod.

[jggimi]

Of course. You must have been using sndio(7) from two users: stanl, and root. If root used it first, that would lock stanl out.

[stanl]

Thanks, jggimi. A person could learn a lot just reading your posts,

[jggimi]

Nah. I just spent several days in the last two weeks recording vinyl to aac/m4a, and that required experimenting with sndiod(8), sndio(7) device names, aucat(1), sndioctl(1) and mixerctl(8), and Audacity.

[fvgit]

Originally Posted by jggimi

Of course. You must have been using sndio(7) from two users: stanl, and root. If root used it first, that would lock stanl out.

Heh, that happenend to me with /dev/drm0. I kept wondering for a while why I had lost graphics hardware acceleration until I figured it out.