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For deployments where China is not preferred in system install/boot root of trust, standalone grub2 can boot multiple ISOs and VHDs.

Sample configs for grub2 ISO boot, e.g. USB or secondary disk partition for system recovery, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38663958

There is dedicated hardware to emulate optical drives, e.g. Korean IODD sells SSD enclosures to emulate up to 4 virtual optical drives in parallel, mapped to ISOs or VHDs. As a standalone device, this keeps untrusted emulation code away from the system CPU. The output of that untrusted code could be verified, e.g. by hashing the emulated ISO.

Indeed, many of Ventoy's magic come from GRUB2, Ventoy just wins in ease of use by autodetecting whatever's tossed onto the drive without manually editing the boot menu.

Microsoft has supported "Native VHD Boot" since at least Windows 7 [1], but it is cool this project can configure it automatically.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/community/t...

Now that’s awesome. Thanks for that, I was not aware of this feature.