GRUB 2.06 To Be Succeeded By... GRUB 2.11 Bootloader Next Year

Following this week's release of the big and long overdue GRUB 2.06 bootloader release, there is already development talk and action for the next release. Succeeding GRUB 2.0, GRUB 2.02, GRUB 2.04, and GRUB 2.06 is now going to be a bit of a version shakeup with GRUB 2.11 to be the next release.

It seems after these GRUB 2.xx releases over the past few years, they have now decided they don't like version numbers with leading zeros as some scripts are apparently still having problems dealing with them.

Following the GRUB 2.06 release, the GRUB version was bumped to 2.11. The commit justified the version change as "Skip versions between 2.07 and 2.10 to avoid leading zeros in minor version number. This way version parsing in scripts should be easier."

GRUB maintainer Daniel Kiper of Oracle also issued a mailing list post confirming the tree is now unfrozen for new code. Now he'll be looking at all of the patches that have been collecting in recent months to figure out what to merge. He also hopes this cycle to improve GRUB's governance, testing, and more. The hope is to get this next GRUB release out in H1'2022.

Among the features being talked about for GRUB 2.11 are Argon2 support for LUKS2, OSProber support for LUKS2, and other (U)EFI related enhancements. As always, as any interesting changes hit GRUB Git we'll be sure to call them out on Phoronix.