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5. Pipewire doesn't use buffer rewinding, which was a rich source of complexity and bugs not only in PulseAudio, but also exposed bugs in the kernel audio device drivers. And even bugs or poorly specified behavior in HW itself, considering AFAIU neither macOS, Windows (nor Jack) use rewinding.

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The PA docs claim that buffer rewinding is used to achieve low-latency updates to a high-latency stream. E.g., user wants to change volume now on some music that has a 2 second buffer. Seems like a common use case.

How does Pipewire deal with this?

Also-- links to the audio driver bug reports, please!

Also-- links to info on the hardware bugs, please!

I believe you, I just want to read about them.

>How does Pipewire deal with this?

It doesn't, it sets a much shorter max buffer length so that the latency is always acceptable. This does mean that in theory, with an otherwise totally idle system, PipeWire can't be quite as low power as PA.

So if Windows/MacOS/Jack all lack support for buffer rewinding without noticeable latency, does that imply that Pulse encourages the use of abnormally large buffers compared to what all other audio systems use?

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