Ventoy CPIO

An alternate ramdisk for Ventoy.

Docs are available here and releases here.

NOTE: This is just a small part of my attempt to add a sane(-ish) build system to Ventoy.

Goal

Make a replacement ramdisk for Ventoy

• [?] with a sane(-er) build system
• a bootable one
• a functionally identical one
  (i.e. can do the same things as the upstream)
• a smaller one

Non-goals

• ❌ a binary-identical ramdisk to the official one
  • compiling identical binaries with the instructions given would be near impossible and is ultimately pointless
  • however, ramdisks built with this project should be reproducible

Possible future changes

• Removing suffixes from binaries (they're just annoying and inconsistent)
  (no upstream changes required)
• Splitting the ramdisks into x86 32-bit and 64-bit
  (would require changes to grub)
• Cleaning up shell scripts in the ramdisk
  (no upstream changes required)

Progress

It boots, but some functionality might not work.

ventoy.cpio

100%, since it's literally just xz-ing a bunch of files.

Size ratio:

• du - 1 (64 / 64)
• ls -l - 1 (62976 / 62976)

ventoy_ARCH.cpio

~75%

All the tools are here (mostly), compiled in one way or another. Now all that's left is optimization.

Size ratio (x86):

• du - 0.8540245566166439 (2504 / 2932)
• ls -l - 0.8624375107740045 (2561536 / 2970112)

Size ratio (arm64):

• du - 0.8159806295399516 (1348 / 1652)
• ls -l - 0.8159490600363857 (1377792 / 1688576)

Size ratio (mips64):

• du - 0.9816849816849817 (1072 / 1092)
• ls -l - 0.981642955484167 (1095168 / 1115648)

vtloopex.cpio

TODO: add this

Usage

Building

docker compose build

docker compose up

Hint:

If you don't want to redownload archives every time you rebuild the container, go to docker/base/{dietlibc,musl,toolchains}, look through the setup script and manually wget the file.

You can also run this to enter the container:

docker run -it --rm \
  -v ".:/build" \
  ventoy-cpio-builder:latest \
  bash

Setup

Once you have ventoy*.cpio files:

1. Mount the second partition on your Ventoy usb
2. !!! BACK UP THE ORIGINAL ventoy*.cpio FILES !!!
3. Copy the cpio you want to try out. (hint: if you don't know which one it is, then it's probably ventoy_x86.cpio)

Mini TODO

• Build with an older version of Linux headers for compatibility

Notes

• In GCC terms:
  • The build is assumed to be x86_64 *nix
  • The host (for ventoy installation tools) is assumed to be x86_64
  • The targets are x86_64, i386, aarch64 and mips64el