Well-known features

This is a list of some well-known features that can be enabled or disabled accordingly.

There are many more features actually defined in the configuration file, and it can be confusing to go through them. This list here is meant to be a quick reference for the most common ones that actually make sense to be toggled in a configuration file in order to customize WirePlumber’s behavior.

Hardware monitors

Audio

hardware.audio

Enables bringing up audio hardware.

Wants:

monitor.alsa, monitor.alsa-midi

monitor.alsa

Enables the ALSA device monitor.

Wants:

monitor.alsa.reserve-device

monitor.alsa.reserve-device

Enables D-Bus device reservation API for ALSA devices.

Requires:

support.reserve-device

monitor.alsa-midi

Enables the ALSA MIDI device monitor.

Bluetooth

hardware.bluetooth

Enables bringing up bluetooth hardware.

Wants:

monitor.bluez, monitor.bluez-midi

monitor.bluez

Enables the BlueZ device monitor.

Wants:

monitor.bluez.seat-monitoring

monitor.bluez.seat-monitoring

Enables seat monitoring on the bluetooth monitor.

When enabled, this will make sure that the bluetooth devices are only enabled on the active seat.

Requires:

support.logind

monitor.bluez-midi

Enables the BlueZ MIDI device monitor.

Wants:

monitor.bluez.seat-monitoring

Video

hardware.video-capture

Enables bringing up video capture hardware (cameras, hdmi capture devices, etc.)

Wants:

monitor.v4l2, monitor.libcamera

monitor.v4l2

Enables the V4L2 device monitor.

monitor.libcamera

Enables the libcamera device monitor.

Support components

support.dbus

Provides a D-Bus connection to the session bus. This is needed by some other support features (see below) but it is generally optional. WirePlumber does not require a D-Bus connection to work.

On a system where WirePlumber is configured to run system-wide (headless, embedded, etc), this will most likely fail to load and thus disable all the other support features that require it. On such systems it makes sense to disable this feature explicitly, to avoid the overhead of trying to connect to the session bus.

support.reserve-device

Provides support for the D-Bus device reservation API, allowing the device monitors to reserve devices for exclusive access.

Requires:

support.dbus

support.portal-permissionstore

Integrates with the flatpak portal permission store to give appropriate access permissions to flatpak applications.

Requires:

support.dbus

support.logind

Integrates with systemd-logind to enable specific functionality only on the active seat.

Policies

policy.standard

Enables the standard WirePlumber policy. This includes all the logic for enabling devices, linking streams, granting permissions to clients, etc, as appropriate for a desktop system.

policy.role-priority-system

Enables the role priority system policy. This system creates virtual sinks that group streams based on their media.role property, and assigns a priority to each role. Depending on the priority configuration, lower priority roles may be corked or ducked when a higher priority role stream is active.

This policy was designed for automotive and mobile systems and may not work as expected on desktop systems.

Note that this policy is implemented as a superset of policy.standard, so policy.standard should not be disabled when enabling this policy.

Requires:

policy.standard