[Feature request] Live ISO for use with Ventoy

[probonopd]

Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/EFI files. With ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/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. This has the big advantage that if you are using multiple Live systems you don't need a dedicated USB drive for each one, but can store all the ISOs alongside each other. 470+ ISO files are tested (list), including

• FreeBSD
• GhostBSD
• FuryBSD

It would be great if NomadBSD could be booted this way, too.

[emk2203]

The latest 1.0.70 still doesn't boot NomadBSD. The error message is

Failed to boot from ufs:///dev/label/nomadbsd with error 2

Support for this would be really great since it's a distro tailor-made for use from removable media.

[probonopd]

NomadBSD could probably do what helloSystem is doing since 0.7.0:

Add geom_ventoy_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf and add the Ventoy kernel module.

[emk2203]

Thanks for alerting me to helloSystem. It might be even better suited for my purposes.

In general, supporting Ventoy would be the best way for a distribution. With 32k likes in early 2022, it's certainly popular enough to spend the effort distribution-side to make a tryout easier. I don't see that Ventoy can and will spend much effort to support the more exotic stuff.

Don't know if the rest of the setup process when running conflicts with the Ventoy layout and philosophy, though. In a normal install, you end up with a stick with an EFI partion, the UFS system partition and the rest of the stick with a UFS "data" partition with a size of the rest of the stick.