Oracle's Daniel Kiper brings us an update on the GRUB bootloader at FOSDEM 2024.
Not only did he share the current development progress, but he also looked ahead to the future and revealed plans for a new version expected to be released in November. Back in December, Grub 212 have already met with us, with the previous version of grub 206 compared to the time it spans two years. However, according to the shared plan for 2024, 2A successor to 12 is already on the way, which is expected to launch in November of this year. In order to resume the annual GRUB release cadence, the freeze is expected to take place around October in preparation for the next release.
Grub's current and upcoming features are exciting, including NX support for the EFI platform, TrenchBoot support for Intel and AMD platforms, and automatic disk unlocking with the TPM2 module. In addition, there are many more downstream patches of various kinds, such as the hundreds of downstream patches carried by Fedora. In addition, a continuity integration (CI) infrastructure was established, bug fixes, and documentation improvements were made. These features will further improve the performance and functionality of Grub, bringing a better user experience.