If fossil+venti is chosen during installation, the entire venti arena partition is cleared. Is there a way to avoid clearing all of the arena space? Since in a sense it is an append only log, and the purpose for clearing it is, presumably, to allow recreating the index, may be a shortcut exists? Doing so will save a lot of time and space particularly on a qemu VM. In qemu one can use a sparse file or a qcow format file which allocates space only for data actually written. Writing even zeroes can eat up space.
Perhaps it is easier to add a do-not-zero option for install as a fresh qemu disk is already "cleared". Of course, it doesn't make much sense to use venti under qemu but p9p does not run on all the platforms (notably windows).
