The Ventoy 1.0.79 release has been published, designed for creating bootable USB drives that include multiple operating systems. The program is notable for enabling OS booting from unchanged ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD, and EFI images without requiring image extraction or media reformatting. For example, it is enough to simply copy a set of desired ISO images to a USB flash drive with the Ventoy bootloader, and Ventoy will allow booting the operating systems contained within. At any moment, you can replace or add new ISO images simply by copying new files, which is convenient for testing and previewing 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. Developers have tested the functionality with Ventoy using more than 940 ISO images, including various versions of Windows and Windows Server, several hundred Linux distributions (it is reported that 90% of distributions listed on distrowatch.com were tested), and over 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).
The new version adds support for the Fedora CoreOS distribution. The bootable image Super-UEFIinSecureBoot-Disk, used for running unsigned EFI programs and operating systems in UEFI Secure Boot mode, has been reverted to version 3.3. The number of supported ISO images has been increased to 940. Issues with the kickstart mode in distributions based on RHEL have been resolved.
Source: opennet.ru
