Reezy Posted November 14, 2020 Share Posted November 14, 2020 Hey guys! Yesterday I updated my system from Catalina to Big Sur. There were no issues during the installation and the system has since been running fine with the new OS. But there is one exception: fontd is constantly running at 100 % CPU. This has been going on for the last 15 hours. When I kill it it just comes back within seconds and is at 100 % again. The logging console is flooded with thousands of copies of this message: XType - FontAsset update timer fired. This clearly indicates to me that something is going wrong with fontd. I have no idea what is causing this, but it is somehow locking up this service. What I have tried so far: killing the service -> comes right back at 100 % CPU as soon as some application needs access to fonts clearing the font cache (atsutil databases -remove) -> no effect validating all fonts in Font Book.app -> all fonts are fine removing all user installed fonts -> no effect disabling the service using launchctl -> no effect completely reinstalling the OS -> no effect My setup: macOS 11.0.1 (20B29) OpenCore 0.6.3 config.plist and everything else carefully created using the Dortania guides I don't even think it is related to any Hackintosh stuff and it might just be a bug in Big Sur, but maybe some of you have an idea. The ultimate measure might be a clean install, but I really want to avoid that. Thanks guys! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reezy Posted November 15, 2020 Author Share Posted November 15, 2020 I got it fixed! How did I do it? Short Answer Delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.FontRegistry.user and kill fontd one last time. Long Answer I created another user account and to my surprise the issue didn't happen for that account. So the issue wasn't system-wide and something in my user directory must be the culprit. I had another look for any possibly related files and found ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.FontRegistry.user. And in fact the file looked weird. Its modification time was far in the future (year 2262) and the value of LastUpdate in the actual plist was even farther in the future. The mentioned update timer in fontd is probably looking at this value to decide whether an update is necessary. And since the value was so far out of range it probably made fontd constantly think the update is due now. So how did I end up with these weird time values? I suspect this was caused by my real time clock not working correctly. I sometimes notice that my system shows some date in the future after waking from sleep. It stays like this only for a couple of seconds until the correct time is synced again with a time server. I guess during that brief moment fontd must have written to that plist file taking the current time which was still far in the future. I really need to get that RTC fixed in my OpenCore configuration. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marvelloard Posted January 3, 2021 Share Posted January 3, 2021 Thank you, had the same issue! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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