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
Can you use dd to create multiboot USB drives? Even the link you shared lists Ventoy as an option.
No. But in my case that’s just a minor inconvenience considering the infrequency of having to use a live USB. And at work I just use separate USBs for wiping drives and OS installs. I much prefer the peace of mind that comes with knowing there’s no Ventoy blob that could potentially infect all its installed operating systems with malware.
In any case, it seems it is possible to manually make a multiboot USB drive manually. Haven’t tried it yet though.
I know. I simply linked that website because it’s where I learned dd from and because for novices it might be less overwhelming than the Arch Wiki.
Clearly you are not the target audience. For IT pros and tech enthusiasts regularly rebuilding machines and running numerous diagnostic tools from boot, the ability to quickly bootstrap a machines is a massive timesaver. dd is slower and may mean carrying around a lot of usb sticks, something these people all graduated from.