EasyOS 4.5.5 does not work with Ventoy either

Earlier today I tested EasyOS 5.0 with Ventoy:

https://bkhome.org/news/202303/ventoy-does-not-work-with-easyos.html

Forum member jaje mentioned "EasyOS 4" working, and I do recall some other people reporting success awhile back. So I decided to test the last of the Dunfell-series, version 4.5.5. No, also fails:

The command-prompt at the bottom of the snapshot means that I can experiment and try to determine what is going wrong.

What I did with the .img file is increased the size beforehand, that is, before copying it to the Ventoy USB-stick:

# truncate -s 4G easy-4.5.5-amd64.img

What should happen is that the 'init' script in the 'initrd' file will expand the working-partition to fill the vacant space. I don't know about those errors in the above snapshot, but apart from those, I discovered that the working-partition cannot be resized.

Easy is being booted in an artificial environment, where the drive is seen as /dev/ventoy, or /dev/mapper/ventoy and the working-partition as /dev/ventoy2 or /dev/mapper/ventoy2
The 'initrd' has the full 'fdisk' utility from the util-linux package, the variety in busybox is not used. I experimented and found that fdisk tries to resize the working-partition; however, when it writes to the partition table, there is an "invalid argument" error.

I tested with busybox "partprobe /dev/ventoy" and other parameters; in all cases got "invalid argument".

I also tested increasing the working-partition ext4 filesystem to fill the 4GiB drive beforehand, so that the initrd won't have to do it, but still stops with errors as in above snapshot.

I conclude that this artificial environment is just wrong for Easy.

So, why are people using Ventoy?

What comes to mind first is "distro-hoppers". They would copy an ISO to the Ventoy flash-stick, then be able to evaluate it. Well, most of the mainstream distros are not really intended to run as what we used to call a "live-CD"; they are intended to install to the internal drive.

Ok, "live-CD" distros, like Puppy Linux could be useful with Ventoy. So you can boot the pup you want. The pups will have save-files and save-folders in the computer internal drive, unlike Easy that has the save-folder in the working-partition in the flash-stick.

Easy is very different. Easy is not going to be happy constrained to any drive size under 4GB, and really won't be happy unless it has 8GB or more. So putting a small .img, even if you have used 'truncate' to increase the .img to 4GB, is only satisfactory for evaluation purposes.

Even if Easy is fixed to work with Ventoy, I don't know what the repercussions will be when the working-partition is /dev/ventoy2.

Just write the Easy .img file to its own flash-stick. It is so easy to do. Give it the entire flash-drive to play in. Don't bother with Ventoy.

That's my opinion. If you still want to use Easy with Ventoy, take it up with the Ventoy developers.

EDIT 2023-03-16:
In the previous post, linked above, I reported compiling 5.15.99 kernel with DM builtin, and it hung at bootup.

However, it has turned out that 5.15.99 introduced a serious bug that caused a hang at boot. It was fixed in 5.15.101:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.15.101-Hot-Fix      

Tags: easy