The latest update from Ventoy, version 1.1.0, has been released. Ventoy is a tool designed to create bootable USB drives that can load multiple operating systems. With this program, users can load operating systems directly from ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD, and EFI image files without the need to unpack or reformat the image. By simply copying the ISO file onto a USB flash drive with the Ventoy bootloader, users can easily boot up various operating systems contained within the images. It also allows for the quick addition or replacement of ISO images, making it convenient for testing and exploring different distributions and operating systems. Ventoy is an open-source project distributed under the GPLv3 license.
Ventoy supports loading on systems with BIOS, IA32 UEFI, X86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI, UEFI Secure Boot, and MIPS64el UEFI with MBR or GPT partition tables. It can load various options for Windows, Linux, BSD, ChromeOS, as well as virtual VMware and Xen virtual machines. The developers have tested Ventoy with over 1200 ISO images, including various Windows versions, Linux distributions, BSD systems, and more.
Aside from USB drives, Ventoy can also be installed on local disks, SSDs, NVMEs, SD cards, and other drive types using Fat32, Exfat, NTFS, UDF, XFS, or EXT2/4/4 file systems. It offers automated OS installation in a single file on a supported medium, with the ability to add custom files to the environment. This feature is useful for creating images with operating systems that do not support a live mode.
The new version of Ventoy introduces support for over 1200 ISOs, including ISO images from distributions like eweos which uses dinit, Musl, Busybox, Clang, Pacman, and Wayland. Issues with loading SystemRescue 11.02+ have been resolved, and the ShIM boot layer has been updated to address problems with checking SBAT data. Additionally, the project iventoy now provides a PXE server with functionalities similar to Ventoy, enabling network-based system loading instead of local drives.