Hi all, In fontconfig's CVS branch 'fc-2_4_branch', you'll find a version of fontconfig that mmaps font information (FcPatterns and company) to and from disk. When you run the new fc-cache executable, it will create a 'fonts.cache-2' file in each font-containing directory. Fontconfig will then mmap in data structures from each fonts.cache-2 file and use these fonts just like it used to. This solution is portable across platforms: fontconfig creates a signature from machine characteristics (i.e. the sizes of the relevant datatypes and the endianness) and stores multiple copies of the fonts information in each cache file. Can't create caches in the font directories? The global per-user fonts cache still works as it did before, except that it now uses mmapable content. The only API change is to FcDirSave, which no longer takes a *dirs argument. I suppose it could, if it had to. Data structures are not observably different from before: there are some additional types in the FcValue union, but they will never be used in an FcValue that is returned to client code. The mmap is indifferent with respect to where the patterns get loaded into memory: when writing to disk, fontconfig allocates one chunk of memory per directory and writes relative pointer differences within the chunk. The pointers are reconstituted before they are passed to client code. Enjoy! Please test this branch and report any problems to me. I believe that this code is relatively solid, although I'm sure that there are some minor omissions. pat
