The unifont layer of libsystemd-terminal provides a fallback font for
situations where no system-fonts are available, or if you don't want to
deal with traditional font-formats for some reasons.
The unifont API mmaps a pre-compiled bitmap font that was generated out of
GNU-Unifont font-data. This guarantees, that all users of the font will
share the pages in memory. Furthermore, the layout of the binary file
allows accessing glyph data in O(1) without pre-rendering glyphs etc. That
is, the OS can skip loading pages for glyphs that we never access.
Note that this is currently a test-run and we want to include the binary
file in the GNU-Unifont package. However, until it was considered stable
and accepted by the maintainers, we will ship it as part of systemd. So
far it's only enabled with the experimental --enable-terminal, anyway.
Veres Lajos