GRUB 2.12 Bootloader Brings SDL2 Support, Boot Loader Interface

GRUB 2.06 was released back in June of 2021 and today it's finally been succeeded by... GRUB 2.12. This latest GRUB stable release has been a long time coming but it's finally out before the new year and it's packing many features for this widely-used open-source bootloader.

Over the past two and a half years there has been a lot of fixes to land, unifying the EFI Linux kernel loader across architectures, initial Boot Loader Interface support, SDL2 support, handling for the LoongArch CPU architecture, and pretty much improvements across the board. The official release highlights include:

* GCC 13 support.
* clang 14 support.
* binutils 2.38 support.
* Unification of EFI Linux kernel loader across architectures.
* Transition to EFI Linux kernel stub loader for x86 architecture.
* Initial support for Boot Loader Interface.
* Support for dynamic GRUB runtime memory addition using firmware calls.
* PCI and MMIO UARTs support.
* SDL2 support.
* LoongArch support.
* TPM driver fixes.
* Many filesystems fixes.
* Many CVE and Coverity fixes.
* Debugging support improvements.
* Tests improvements.
* Documentation improvements.
* ...and tons of other fixes and cleanups...

It's a big release and you can look forward to finding GRUB 2.12 in most 2024 Linux distribution releases. Some Linux distributions like Ubuntu 23.10 have already been relying on the GRUB 2.12 release candidate that shipped earlier this year.

The brief GRUB 2.12 release announcement can be read on the GRUB-devel list.