> > 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. > > Any sparse file worth its salt would catch the case > where you write zeros to a hole and not do anything.
Creating a hole is as easy as seeking beyond the end of a file and scribbling something but maintaining its holeyness by checking every write for a block of zeroes is quite expensive. > That said, I'd rather leave the zeroing in for now. > The new venti, which I am testing on Plan 9 right now, > does not require the zeroing. This is a much better solution -- I didn't realize this was imminent. Thanks!
