[Qt-interest] Problem with Qt QWS font bitmap caching among multiple processes.

[Atlant Schmidt]

Folks:

  We're having a problem with font corruption in our Qt / QWS / Embedded
  Linux environment. We've diagnosed it, but haven't corrected it yet.


  Executive summary:

  We have multiple processes sharing a single QWS instance (as you'd
  expect). They also share .qsf cached font bitmap files in the /tmp
  directory. When Process A expands a cached bitmap file, Process B
  may try to use one of the new characters (because it sees from the
  QPF glyph index that the glyph has now been rendered) but Process B
  hasn't yet expanded its mmap'ed window into the .qsf file. As a result,
  Process B either copies garbage (if there's additional accessible
  mmap'ed space immediately beyond that window) or SEGVs (if
  there's no mapped space immediately beyond that window).

  This is with Qt 4.6.2. (4.6.3 was current when we froze our specs but it
  had a different font problems that I've previously mentioned here.)

  Does anyone recognize this problem? And better yet, know of a patch
  that fixes it? Or can say with certainty that it's fixed in a newer version
  of Qt?


  A few more details:

        [cid:image001.gif at 01CBE4C0.F25D5DD0]       [cid:image004.gif at 01CBE4C0.896766E0]

  Here's a "2" character in Luxi Sans 40-pixel bold font in both the
  correct and typically-corrupted state. The grey stuff in the middle
  of that "2" is actually the QPF2 header of the next .qsf file in
  virtual memory. If you read the bytes of the grey stuff, the
  printable bytes are:

     "QPF2 ... Luxi Sans ... /usr/lib/fonts/luxisr.ttf".


  Various characters in various fonts can get corrupted but it always
  has to be a character whose position in the .qsf file causes it to
  span two pages in virtual memory. Because we never get entire
  characters corrupted, I'm supposing that Qt apparently does the
  right thing (unmmaps and remmaps the file) if the starting address
  of the character in the QPF2 glyph map is beyond the currently-
  mapped memory; it only fouls up if the character starts in the
  currently-mapped memory and "runs over" into memory that
  doesn't belong to that .qsf file.


                                                        Atlant


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