this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
185 points (98.4% liked)

Linux

53840 readers
1340 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
nooter692@lemmy.ml
AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml
MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml
cypherpunks@lemmy.ml
cyclohexane@lemmy.ml
d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
185
Progress update on the Ventoy blob problem (github.com)
submitted 3 days ago by fnrir@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/linux@lemmy.ml
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 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 21 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 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 20 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 1 points 20 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.