GRUB 2.04 Release Candidate Brings Globs Of New Features

It's been 23 months since the release of GRUB 2.02 while the next release, GRUB 2.04, is finally around the corner. GRUB 2.04-rc1 was issued today as the first test release for this widely-used open-source bootloader.

With being two years in development, there is a lot of new functionality with GRUB 2.04. Among the changes for this GNU boot-loader are supporting multiple early initrd images, support for the F2FS file-system, a verifier framework, RISC-V support, UEFI Secure Boot shim support, Btrfs Zstd improvements, Btrfs RAID5/RAID6 support, Xen PVH support, UEFI TPM 1.2/2.0 support, and a lot of other work... It's really quite a big release all around.

Hopefully the release candidate vetting will go well and GRUB 2.04 will be officially christened soon. Those wanting to try out GRUB 2.04-rc1 can grab the sources via Savannah Git.