A New Release Of GRUB 2.0 Fixes Security Issue

It was just about two weeks ago that GRUB 2.0 moved closer to release with version 1.97 finally making it out the door after being just shy of two years without a new release. GRUB 1.97 brought Mac OS X kernel support, EXT4 file-system support, support for RAID 4/6/10, high-resolution timer support, support for loading FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD kernels, and many other changes. However, today another new release of GRUB 2.0 is available: GRUB 1.97.1.

This new release of GRUB is coming so soon as a rather important bug was discovered in GRUB 2.0. As is documented in the bug report, with GRUB 1.97 the password-based security for this free software boot-loader is rather compromised. With GRUB 1.97, if your password was "phoronix", any individual could log-in just entering "p" or "nix" or any other part of the string -- even just one character. With the just-out GRUB 1.97.1, this issue has been addressed.

Besides this important fix, GRUB 1.97.1 also has support for GNU/Hurd, fixes for a build problem on Mac OS X, and various documentation / error message improvements.

GRUB 1.97.1 is available for download from this directory.