GRUB 2.02 Has Many Features, Might Hit Ubuntu 14.04

Development of GRUB 2.02 has been going well for well over one year and at least some Canonical developers are hoping to land the Free Software Foundation's updated boot-loader into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS even if it means using a development version for the time being.

Colin Watson is wanting to push GRUB 2.02 for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as it contains a lot of new features but it's currently in beta, which isn't good good with the April Ubuntu Linux update being a Long-Term Support release. Colin has pushed the GRUB 2.02 Beta into the Trusty-Proposed archive and is hoping it will receive a fair amount of testing that makes it reasonable to land in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr.

Among the improvements to be found in GRUB 2.02 include Coreboot CBFS support, 64-bit EXT2 support, a new proc file-system framework, LVM UUIDs are used where possible, Coreboot frame-buffer support, terminal display improvements, improved TFTP support, ARM U-Boot and EFI ports, a Xen PV port, ARM64 EFI port, Yeeloong 3A support, support for USB debug dongles, performance improvements, and various utility improvements.

Changes for GRUB 2.02 can be found via GRUB Git's NEWS file while if you're wanting to help test out the updated GRUB 2.02 Beta release that was pushed intro trusty-proposed a few hours ago, read this mailing list post.