how about to use ventoy for installing haiku?
not only ventoy , but other 3rd tool.
these are the words.
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
With ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly.
You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them (screenshot).
You can also browse ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files in local disks and boot them.
x86 Legacy BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI and MIPS64EL UEFI are supported in the same way.
Most types of OS supported (Windows/WinPE/Linux/ChromeOS/Unix/VMware/Xen…)
1100+ image files are tested (list), 90%+ distros in distrowatch.com supported (details
I use Ventoy for Linux distros occasionally, BSD didn’t work from it, (for me), so doubt Haiku will, it seems to be a bit specific…even though they say Unix!
This requires specific support from the Linux/Windows/… kernel. It is also slower than normal boot because of the extra indirection (a filesystem inside another filesystem). In Haiku this is not possible currently.
Ventoy doesn’t need changes in the NT or Linux kernels IIRC. Official Windows ISOs from Microsoft do work with it. What changes would be needed for Haiku to support Ventoy?
I didn’t say “changes” but “specific support”. The way Ventoy works is by passing some info to the OS to tell it the root filesystem is loaded in RAM (by the way, this will mean that RAM is not available for other things) instead of loaded from disk.
So we would have to handle that info in the Haiku loader, and convert it to the correct format for the haiku kernel.
Also, yes, it does change your disk images, but it does so in RAM and does not write the changes back to the USB disk. Unless your system is already patched and declares itself to be “Ventoy compatible”. compatible mark . Ventoy If you look at Ventoy sources you will find the specific patches for each supported Linux version: Ventoy/IMG/cpio/ventoy/hook at master · ventoy/Ventoy · GitHub
Booting this way requires specialzed OS support, we do not have this support. (and if we did, a folder of hpkg files to take from the filesystem the isos are in would make more sense than booting from an iso)
It’s a bit worse than that, Ventoy patches the OSes it knows about when creating the bootable disk. It does so by injecting its own binary blobs into the system, for which the sources are not available. This means, what you are booting is not exactly the ISO image you used, and it’s unclear what the changes are since there is no full sourcecode for it.
I recommend to pick another solution to boot operating systems until this is resolved.
Even if you don’t care about the security implications of this, it makes it difficult to investigate and report bugs. You could think that problems come from the OS you’re trying to boot, when in fact, it’s the patches that Ventoy did that break things. And I think this is not very well understood by people using Ventoy, who expect it to be a slight variation on other tools to write an OS to an USB drive.
Oh. I was not really aware that Ventoy injects code into the ISOs. I just saw that ventoy is a popular tool and also open source so just started using it. Also, tbh it’s quite convenient to use. I will keep your advice in mind in the future. Thank you for the information.
