The release of Ventoy 1.0.90 has been published, a toolkit for creating bootable USB drives that can include multiple operating systems. The program stands out because it allows the loading of OS from unmodified ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD, and EFI images without needing to unpack the image or reformat the drive. For instance, simply copying the desired ISO images onto a USB flash drive with the Ventoy bootloader will allow the booting of the operating systems contained within. At any time, new ISO images can be replaced or added by simply copying the new files, making it convenient for testing and familiarization with various distributions and operating systems. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv3 license.
Ventoy supports booting on systems with BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI, UEFI Secure Boot, and MIPS64EL UEFI with MBR or GPT partition tables. It supports various versions of Windows, WinPE, Linux, BSD, ChromeOS, and images from Vmware and Xen. The developers have tested Ventoy with over 1200 ISO images, including various versions of Windows and Windows Server, several hundred Linux distributions, and more than a dozen BSD systems (FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, pfSense, FreeNAS, etc.). of virtual machines Vmware and Xen. The developers have tested interoperability with Ventoy using over 1100 ISO images, including various versions of Windows and Windows Server, several hundred Linux distributions (it is claimed that 90% of the distributions listed on distrowatch.com have been verified), and more than a dozen BSD systems (FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, pfSense, FreeNAS, etc.).
In the new version, the number of supported ISO images has exceeded 1200. Support for the ISO images of the eweOS distribution has been added (which uses dinit, musl, busybox, clang, pacman, and wayland). Issues with loading SystemRescue 11.02+ have been resolved. The Shim boot layer has been updated (solving the issue with SBAT data verification). The iVentoy project is also being developed, providing a PXE server with capabilities similar to Ventoy (the difference is in booting systems over the network instead of from a local drive).
In the new version, the number of supported ISO images has been increased to 1100. Support for the LibreELEC 11 and Chimera Linux distributions has been added. Optimizations for the boot process of Fedora Linux have been implemented, and an issue with identifying installation builds of Fedora Rawhide has been resolved. The VTOY_LINUX_REMOUNT option is now functioning on systems with Intel Gen11+ CPUs and Linux kernels 5.18+.
Source: opennet.ru
