Anyone here uses Teams on FreeBSD?

I (shamefully) have to use Google Chrome and sometimes (ungoogled-chromium) to get Teams working on FreeBSD. The audio drops mid-call if the amount of free RAM drops below 50%. I was suspecting the issue to be VPN, wg, pf but none of them were the true culprits.
I have 32 GB of RAM but not sure if it is ZFS or KDE but even after closing Firefox (with 200+ tabs), shutting down Guests on vbox and bhyve still the RAM does not clear up. The only way to get a stable Teams audio call is to reboot. If I go about my day and have some things running, Teams either won't pick up audio or would drop it mid call both incoming and outgoing voice and sometimes Screen sharing also ends up crashing others' Teams app :O - but that is a diff story.

I tried FFX and it has an echo issue with virtualoss.
Is anyone out there using Teams successfully on FreeBSD?


P.S. How do I get the swap to kick in at startup itself? Never seen swap being used, have one listed under fstab though. Will that help? Do I switch over to UFS2?
 
Teams working perfectly fine on a really old amd64 machine with 8GB RAM that's rarely rebooted here, FreeBSD 13.1, ZFS, chromium...
 
No... what?? HOW? Are you using a non-root user? Can you run chrome as root
(OP is a privacy theatrical performer *runs and hides behind a rock*)
and maintain audio during Teams call? I run as root # chrome --no-sandbox (could that be the reason?)

Can you run a test for me? Could you just fill your RAM up, say > 75% 6GB and see if the audio drops mid-call? I know this is a strange request. My call never drops if that's the only thing going on and nothin else is actively competing with it.
 
Can you run chrome as root
No. Well, maybe I could, but I certainly don't want to...

Edit: I wouldn't be surprised if "running as root" is exactly your problem. Why are you doing that? Furthermore, are any other layers (ALSA, some sound daemon like pulseaudio, ...) involved? If so try to have the browser use "OSS" (/dev/dsp) directly to rule that out.

My RAM is always well used, currently I get "262M Free" – this by itself certainly can't be the issue.
 
Yes, I am using virtualoss. It uses the internal speakers but uses the mic of the earphones plugged into the headphone jack. You think virtualoss is the culprit?
Chrome does not detect the webcam when run as non-root user. Not sure why but I can live without it.
 
I don't think anything right now :cool: but I'd certainly try to rule it out. This, and, of course, running as root (don't do that, never ever, and if you explain why you do it, I'm pretty sure someone on here can suggest a better solution...).

BTW, from time to time, I do have a sound problem with Teams (and it adds to my scepticism about applications written in javascript). But it never drops during a call. Sometimes it just doesn't work right from joining a meeting. In this case, only a full reload of Teams in the browser helps, leaving and rejoining the same meeting doesn't. :rolleyes:
 
Sometimes it just doesn't work right from joining a meeting. In this case, only a full reload of Teams in the browser helps, leaving and rejoining the same meeting doesn't. :rolleyes:
Story of my life. Have you tried using ungoogled-chromium?
I need to get my internal mic working immediately. Any suggestions about external USB only microphones that work out of the box on FreeBSD?
 
Can confirm, that Teams works fine - even with chromium. However, I'm experiencing choppy/robotic audio outbound - people start hearing my voice in robotic fashion after a random time period. Leaving the call and re-entering usually resolves that, which (at least to me) is an indicator that this might be more of a "Microsoft problem" than a "me problem"...

I'm using a USB based DAC (Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio CODEC) on another workstation, that does not show this problem. Admittedly, that's an indicator that above assessment is likely wrong, but I'm living fine with that cognitive dissonance for the moment.
 
quakerdoomer What I describe certainly isn't a FreeBSD issue (sound input and output works just fine, I can verify that, and I even hear the "signalling" sounds of Teams, just not the actual meeting sound), but an issue with Teams. Maybe only in FreeBSD's chromium, I can't know that, but I doubt it....

So, looking for some USB hardware certainly wouldn't help.

edit: BTW, in our company, almost everyone else uses the electron-flavor of Teams on Windows, and still, some issues happen almost daily...
 
I tried FFX, but since I am using virtualoss it somehow does not play well with it and makes people hear their own echo - my output is somehow seeping into the input. Can't speak for those who are able to use their internal mic.
 
About a year ago, Teams in chromium just crashed as soon as someone started screen sharing. It is solved now (sharing myself works perfectly as well). I don't know whether a Teams or a chromium update solved it...

I would really really prefer a classic, native application (e.g. using Qt). But well ...
 
At least for me, it seems to work. I've installed chromium-107.0.5304.87_1 and just used that for calling last week with the whole nine yards: audio, screen sharing, video - you name it, it works.
 
I've seen Teams work on Firefox but audio only; screen shares and video did not work for me however.
With some faffing and a user agent spoof plugin, you can get Teams to play ball with a standard browser.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/

For a short while a month ago, screen share (I.e *them* sharing the screen), didn't appear on mine and was a bit broken but Microsoft seemed to resolve something.
 
I have 32 GB of RAM but not sure if it is ZFS or KDE but even after closing Firefox (with 200+ tabs), shutting down Guests on vbox and bhyve still the RAM does not clear up.
Even if you quit programs that hog memory, not all of that memory will be returned to the free pool (shown as free in top) but used for ARC. However there should be no problem grabbing memory as you need it. Try the attached program to experiment (rename to hog.c and compile. Instructions in the source code. Note that if you make it allocate a lot of space, the system will start allocating swap and slow down temporarily and may even run out of swap space!).

One suggestion for you is to try compiling the kernel with "options SCHED_4BD" instead of the default "options SCHED_ULE" as it is supposed to be better for interactive programs. See this thread: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2018-April/088678.html

Before recompiling the kernel you can also try "sysctl kern.sched.preempt_thresh=1" or some such low value and see if it helps.

There may be other sound related knobs you can try as well.
 

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No, I don't use Teams on my private FreeBSD box.

Teams on my W10 boss box demonstrates why you'd better run away from it: it hijacks CPU and bandwidth what and whenever. Working from home Teams doesn't run from the W10 box because the fixed line data connection is too narrow. Three kids looking Netflix works on the same connection though. That should be conclusive.

Teams on the familiy Linux Mint box keeps starting after login although that is switched off. Sessions are like calling to Mars with bad intergalactic storms.

IMHO it is malware and you should avoid it like the plague.
 
Story of my life. Have you tried using ungoogled-chromium?
I need to get my internal mic working immediately. Any suggestions about external USB only microphones that work out of the box on FreeBSD?
Have you consulted this page? Excellent points that help to get mic & camera working without root in FreeBSD. At least, I got my camera and mic working in Firefox (I don't use Chrome).
 
Teams works fine here in both Chromium and Firefox. More over, both Teams and Zoom work much better in FreeBSD than in Linux here.
 
Am I the only one? I don't want a webbrowser to get access to a microphone or camera. Such ideas sound really weird to me. Far too much is sacrificed on the altar of comfort, and a "works after all" is simply too little in this day and age.

To get Teams up & running I'm using bhyve with PCI passthrough, Win11 and the desktop application.
 
jmos to begin with, the "desktop application" is mostly the same pile of javascript running in the browser as well, just packaged with electron (so it contains half a browser)...

Then, in a modern browser, you can configure which sites can access e.g. the microphone. And if you don't trust this (sure, there's a potential for bugs), you can launch multiple instances with different profiles, allowing for completely different configurations, and e.g. enable microphone only in the one instance you use to run Teams.
 
Anyone on Firefox?
I can see unlike Chrome, my audio does not drop at all! But, microphone causes echoes as per people. Wondering if a separate device for mic would sort this and if anyone else is facing any issues for Teams under Firefox.
 
Using Teams in Chrome now:
- audio is working
- video, I don’t know I got no cam
- screen sharing is unfortunately not working 😕

Any advice on the screen sharing issue would be appreciated! 🤓
 
For me screens haring works. It might be dependent upon camera. Also, I read somewhere that once someone shares their screen, you might be able to as well, but that's not a fix. Does your laptop have a cam? If yes, then it should be easy to enable it. Let me know your obseravtions using Firefox. You might have to Disable Enhanced Tracking Protection and of course allow third party MS cookies etc.

On Teams during calls, does your audio drop?
 
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