Release of the GNU GRUB 2.04 boot manager

After two years of development introduced Stable release of the modular cross-platform boot manager GNU GRUB 2.04 (GRand Unified Bootloader). GRUB supports a wide range of platforms, including standard PCs with BIOS, IEEE-1275 platforms (PowerPC/Sparc64-based hardware), EFI systems, RISC-V, MIPS-compatible Loongson 2E processor hardware, Itanium systems, ARM, ARM64, and ARCS (SGI), devices using the free CoreBoot package.

Key innovations:

  • Support for RISC-V architecture;
  • Support for Xen PVH virtualization mode (a combination of paravirtualization (PV) for input/output, interrupt handling, boot management, and hardware interaction, alongside full virtualization (HVM) to restrict privileged instructions, isolate system calls, and virtualize memory page tables);
  • Built-in support for UEFI Secure Boot;
  • Inclusion of a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) driver for UEFI;
  • Delivery of a new obdisk (OpenBoot) driver for systems with firmware compliant with Open Firmware specification (IEEE 1275);
  • Support for RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes in Btrfs. Also added support for zstd compression, though currently presented as experimental and is available only with static linking;
  • Support for PARTUUID (partition identifier in GPT (GUID Partition Tables));
  • Support for VLAN;
  • Built-in support for DHCP;
  • A large number of fixes related to SPARC, ARM, and ARM64 architectures;
  • Enhancement of Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) support;
  • Support for GCC compilers 8 and 9;
  • Code refactoring for integration with Gnulib;
  • Added support for F2FS file system.

Source: opennet.ru

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