The latest version of the Ventoy toolkit, Ventoy 1.1.09, has been released. Ventoy is a tool designed for creating bootable USB media that includes multiple operating systems. With Ventoy, users can boot operating systems from unchanged ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD, and EFI images without the need to unpack the image or reformat the media. By simply copying the desired set of images to a USB Flash drive with the Ventoy bootloader, users can ensure the loading of the operating systems contained within the images. New iso images can be easily added or replaced at any time, making it convenient for testing and familiarizing with various distributions and operating systems. The project’s code is written in C and 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 also supports loading various variants of Windows, WinPE, Linux, BSD, ChromeOS, as well as images of VMware and Xen virtual machines. The developers have tested over 1300 iso images in Ventoy, including different Windows versions, Linux distributions, and BSD systems like FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, pfSense, and FreeNAS.
In addition to USB drives, the Ventoy bootloader can be installed on local disks, SSDs, NVMe drives, SD cards, and other drives using FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, UDF, XFS, or Ext2/3/4 file systems. There is also a mode for automated OS installation in a single file on portable media, with the ability to add extra files to the created environment.
The new version of Ventoy (1.1.09) introduces experimental support for the Btrfs file system, allowing users to use Btrfs partitions and display local disks with Btrfs in the Browser menu. However, Btrfs modes with RAID are not yet supported, and compression of ISO files with Btrfs is unavailable. The update also resolves issues with loading openSUSE 16.0 and working with the persistence plugin in the latest Arch Linux. The previous release, Ventoy 1.1.08, added support for FreeBSD 15 and introduced new tested iso images.