This morning I wrote that the official GRUB 2.00 release was imminent but little did I know that it would be released just 12 hours later. After being in development for more than a decade, the GRUB 2.00 boot-loader has been officially released.

The GRUB2 boot-loader features an EHCI driver, an official theme, ports to Itanium and SGI MIPS architectures, better default video mode selection using monitor EDID information, new drivers (EHCI / AHCI / ESCC serial / EFI / Network stack / VBE on Coreboot), new file-system support, improved file-system capabilities, new boot protocols, performance improvements, better internationalization, and improved installation support.

The new file-system / disk format support is for ExFAT, LZOP, LDM read, LUKS and GELI support, Squash4, and RomFS. Some of the prominent boot protocols now supported are for FreeDOS, Plan9, the ability to load another Coreboot payload when on Coreboot, Ntldr/bootmgr for the Windows boot-loader, PXE chainloading support, and Darwin 11 (Mac OS X 10.7 - Lion) protocol support.

The extensive GRUB 2.00 release announcement in full can be read on the grub-devel mailing list with more features to look forward to from this GNU boot-loader. Too bad though Ubuntu won't be using GRUB2 with UEFI SecureBoot.