GRUB Picks Up Zstd Support To Handle Compressed Btrfs File-Systems

For the past year the Btrfs file-system in the mainline Linux kernel has supported Zstd as one of its file-system compression options. With the very latest GRUB boot-loader code, it can now deal with your Zstd-compressed Btrfs file-systems.

As of Monday, the GNU GRUB boot-loader pulled in a copy of the Zstd decompression code.

The only current user of this Zstd code within GRUB came in the next commit with implementing support for Zstd-compressed Btrfs should your /boot or root partition be compressed using this modern Facebook-developed compression algorithm.

This Zstandard support complements GRUB's existing support for Zlib and LZO compressed file-systems with Btrfs.

The last stable GRUB release was v2.02 in April of 2017. We'll see when the next GRUB stable release comes about considering the many features that have accumulated over the past year and a half.