Re: Is it possible to install NetBSD from Ventoy?

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 12:43:56PM +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
> You don't write an image to anything. You copy a file. It's a normal
> FAT32 filesystem with as many ISO files as will fit and it generates a
> boot menu on the fly every boot. It works on x86-32, x86-64, BIOS and
> UEFI.

The web page does not give any technical details, so it is hard to tell
how it is supposed to work.

Since you tested it with FreeBSD: what devices shows up as root device
there?

Extracting the bootloader and dynamically generating the boot menu is the
easy part, but how is the main part of the ISO filesystem provided to
the kernel?

On some architectures (and amd64 is one of them) the kernel booted from
the ISO is not ramdisk based, but instead mounts the CD's ISO9660 file
system as / (and sets up tmpfs for all writable parts).

I don't see how that could work outside of an emulator.

(and if the kernel would use a memory disk as / all of the ISO is a waste
and it would be better to just use the NetBSD-install kernel instead)

Martin