GRUB 2.04 Is On The Way This Year Along With Other New Bootloader Features

Daniel Kiper of Oracle presented at last week's FOSDEM European conference on the latest upstream work happening around the GRUB boot-loader.

Before getting to the latest changes and plans, this Oracle software developer and GRUB maintainer first recapped some of the highlights of 2018. Improvements there as a reminder included a lot of ARM work, support for multiple early initrd images, Btrfs improvements around supporting Zstd and RAID, UEFI Secure Boot shim support, the verifiers framework, Xen PVH support, UEFI TPM 1.2/2.0 support, and other improvements.

The last major GRUB release was version 2.02 that was nearly two years ago. GRUB 2.04 was aimed for in 2018, but that didn't happen. Fortunately, it looks like we'll see GRUB 2.04 in 2019 with all of the gains made last year plus ongoing work right now.

Current initiatives include collaborating with the TrenchBoot project on boot integrity, RISC-V support, native DHCPv4 support, a UEFI MNP driver, and other changes.

Those wanting to learn more about the current GRUB boot-loader work as well as the current bottlenecks to development, Daniel's slide deck is available along with the WebM recording for his FOSDEM 2019 presentation.