this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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185
Progress update on the Ventoy blob problem (github.com)
submitted 3 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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[–] krolden@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 days ago (3 children)

https://www.iodd.shop/all-products

Much better

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

The current problem with ventoy is that proprietary blobs are essentially an unauditable possible security backdoor.

This product is entirely proprietary, including the hardware, and even worse.

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

All flash drives are proprietary as well what's the difference

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

They are not explicitly designed to boot ISO's?

Also, price. I'm not gonna pay quadruple the price for something that can be done entirely in software.

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Ventoy does not emulate a CDROM it just boots it via grub

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 1 points 19 hours ago

I never got uefi images booting properly on those grub multi boot utility drives. Granted the last time I bothered with it was like 10 years ago now

I haven't had any issues with Ventoy, everything I've attempted to boot works. Doesn't matter how it does it if it works.

[–] fnrir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Interesting. Sadly it only supports FAT32, NTFS and EXFAT with no Linux filesystems.
And Ventoy is free. It's hard to argue with free.

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah that's only for the partition that contains your ISOs.

You can make another ext4 partition on it if you wanted, it just has to not be the first partition on the disk.

Oh and the encryption feature is dumb dont even bother with it

Also you still have to buy your flash drive so why not invest in something better

[–] pogmommy@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, bought the st300 after having repeated issues with ventoy not properly mounting disk images causing multiple Linux distro installs to fail. My st300 might be one of my best investments as a technician just for how seamless and simple it is to use.

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I never got uefi images booting properly on those grub multi boot utility drives. Granted the last time I bothered with it was like 10 years ago now since ive had multiple different iodd enclosures since then.