183
Progress update on the Ventoy blob problem (github.com)
submitted 4 days ago by fnrir@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Posting this since quite a bit has changed since I last posted about this on !technology@lemmy.world.

Here's a rough breakdown of the current status:

  • shared Ventoy components: build and seem to work, needs more testing
    • grub / menu - builds
    • EDK II apps / UEFI chainloader and more - builds
    • iPXE / BIOS chainloader - builds, with fixes for newer toolchains
    • ISO9660 and UDF drivers - TODO
  • Ventoy CPIO / Linux ramdisk: builds; I deemed musl xzcat unneeded, so I skipped it; needs more testing
  • wimboot / Windows chainloader (?) - stalled, I lack the necessary knowledge to work on it
  • geom-ventoy / FreeBSD disk mapping kernel module - is being worked on, slowly; not ready for testing
  • anything else is a TODO

This should be enough to boot Linux with just what's built manually, but I haven't tried that yet.

Secure Boot is just done by using a pre-built bypass package. I'll deal with that later.

Having more people testing this would be nice. :)

Cheers

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[-] koala@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago

I'm still a huge fan of Ventoy, but lately I have been finding more and more issues with it.

So I decided to investigate using a Raspberry Pi Zero with a USB adapter to create a virtual drive:

https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/hardware/using-an-rpi-zero-as-an-usb-drive-to-install-operating-systems.md

It's very wonky and manual at the moment, but I have managed to boot all Linux ISOs successfully so far. Unfortunately, I think only ISOhybrid works OOB, so Windows ISO do not work. I have found some scripts to take Windows ISO and make them ISOhybrid, but haven't gotten around to doing that yet.

I think it should be doable to package this nicely.

this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
183 points (97.9% liked)

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