Who Created and Developed Ventoy?
Ventoy is an open-source multiboot USB utility created and primarily maintained by a software developer known online as longpanda (real name Hailong Sun). This article covers the origins of Ventoy, the identity of its creator, the breakthrough features longpanda introduced to bootable drive creation, and how the project continues to be maintained.
The Creator Behind the Project
Ventoy was officially launched in April 2020 by Chinese developer Hailong Sun, who works publicly under the GitHub handle longpanda. Before Ventoy gained massive popularity across Linux and Windows user communities, creating multi-boot flash drives often involved cumbersome disk formatting tools, complex scripting, or specialized bootloader configurations.
Operating primarily through GitHub and personal open-source channels, longpanda built Ventoy from the ground up to solve the friction of constant drive reformatting. To this day, longpanda remains the principal architect, core committer, and primary maintainer reviewing pull requests and shipping regular update releases.
How Longpanda Revolutionized Bootable USBs
Prior to Ventoy, standard tools like Rufus, UNetbootin, or Etcher required writing disk image contents directly over storage sectors, wiping existing drive contents each time a new operating system installer was needed.
Hailong Sun developed an alternative approach:
- Direct ISO/IMG Booting: Ventoy installs a
specialized boot partition on the flash drive, allowing users to copy
.iso,.wim,.img,.vhd(x), or.efifiles directly onto the storage partition as simple files. - No Formatting Needed for New OS Images: Adding or removing an operating system installer simply requires dragging and dropping files or deleting them.
- Dynamic Menu Generation: Upon system startup, Ventoy queries the drive for compatible image files and builds a native GRUB boot menu automatically.
- Broad Architecture Compatibility: Sun implemented support for legacy x86 BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI, and MIPS64EL UEFI.
Maintenance and Open-Source Ecosystem
While thousands of system administrators, IT professionals, and enthusiasts use Ventoy daily, the software remains largely driven by longpanda's personal efforts. The developer accepts financial contributions via Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors to help support maintenance, bug fixes, hardware testing, and feature development.