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woofQ changes merged into woofQV

June 04, 2025 — BarryK

woofQ builds EasyOS, woofQV builds QV. The latter is a very experimental distribution that I worked on for several months in 2024, then sometime in November 2024 dropped back to working on EasyOS. I posted about why put QV on-hold, see recent posts:

woofQV forked from woofQ; kind of. Most of woofQV is a complete rewrite; however, there are so many common factors. You would pretty much think that you are using EasyOS, except for no SFS files and no containers. No running in RAM either; hence no "save" icon on the desktop.

There are a lot more differences, but so many common factors; many fixes and improvements made to EasyOS this year could also be applied to QV. Lots of scripts are the same, and we have been applying fixes and improvements to them, that need to be merged into woofQV.

It would be extremely tedious to do this manually, going through file-by-file, seeing which ones need to be merged. So, I wrote a script to help. It is here, in woofQV:

https://github.com/bkauler/woof-quantum-vis/blob/main/buildquantumvis/support/merge-woofq-2-woofqv

It has done a pretty good job. Here are all the recent commits:

https://github.com/bkauler/woof-quantum-vis/commits/a3af5a5aeb8f4984330b3819c4fc84be0a2bb2d2/

We have good news with the bcachefs utility, got it to work in the initrd; see github issue:

https://github.com/koverstreet/bcachefs-tools/issues/386

Would like to move forward with introducing bcachefs into QV; without "burning the bridges", so can rollback to btrfs. So will have a variable in woofQV to choose build with btrfs or bcachefs.

One concern with bcachefs is that it is very slow:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-615-filesystems

...if add compression and encryption onto that, wonder how much more speed will degrade?

I know that improving the speed of bcachefs is not a priority now, but even so, it has been under development for a very long time. Originally announced in 2015, so 10 years of development. More than that, because Kent was working on it for a few years prior to 2015.    

Tags: quirky