If you’re experiencing crashes with Amazon DCV 2025.0 on Linux, especially related to PulseAudio, here’s a simple guide on how to address the issue.
Many users have found that the process called dcvagent crashes frequently, and these crashes appear when the system is tearing down the PulseAudio connection. The crash seems to happen because of a conflict during the disconnect process, which leads to a segmentation fault. This typically happens when sessions are long-lived, staying open for weeks or months, and when the PulseAudio connection is being closed.
A practical workaround is to disable audio in new sessions. To do this, you can add a setting in the DCV configuration file located at /etc/dcv/dcv.conf. Simply include the line:
enabled=false
This setting stops dcvagent from creating PulseAudio connections when new sessions start. It was tested, and on hosts with this setting, new sessions don’t establish PulseAudio connections, preventing the crash. This solution has proven effective: hosts with this change did not experience crashes over several days, even with active user sessions.
However, it’s important to note that this setting is not officially documented, and its support status is uncertain. If you want to disable audio completely, check with AWS to confirm whether this method is supported and ask if there’s a better, officially supported way to do this.
Another limitation is that this setting applies only at session creation. If you want to disable audio for a session that is already running, this approach won’t work. The setting is a session-creation parameter and isn’t dynamically reloaded—meaning active sessions keep their current configuration. Currently, there’s no supported method to change this behavior for live sessions. The only way to apply the change to existing sessions is to close them and start new ones, which can disrupt ongoing work.
If you restart the dcvserver service, it generally causes all active sessions to terminate, including the Linux virtual sessions. This means that any open desktops or applications will be closed, and users need to reconnect. For long-lived sessions, this can be disruptive, so plan accordingly.
To sum up, here’s what to ask AWS:
- Is the crash caused by PulseAudio teardown a known issue? Has it been fixed in later builds?
- Is disabling audio with
enabled=falseofficially supported, and can that setting be applied to active sessions? - Is there a supported way to disable audio in existing sessions without restarting or recreating them?
- What exactly happens when you restart the
dcvserverservice in terms of active Linux sessions?
Ideally, a version of DCV that fixes the crash or an official method for disabling audio on active sessions would solve this problem permanently. Until then, the practical approach is to disable the audio feature for new sessions and, where necessary, recreate long-lived sessions to avoid crashes.