Experimental 64-bit EXT2 support is now implemented

Apr 27, 2017 23:59 GMT  ·  By

The long-anticipated GRUB 2.02 open-source bootloader software project was finally promoted to the stable channel after being in Beta stages of development for the past few years.

The development team took their time to finalize the release of GRUB 2.02, which should soon make its way into the stable software repositories of your favorite operating system, but it's finally here and we want to thank them for all their hard work and the awesome new features and improvements implemented so far.

Prominent features of GRUB 2.02 include Big-Endian UFS1 support, experimental 64-bit EXT2 support, GPT PReP support, the ability to use LVM UUIDs if available, proper handling of partitioned LVM, CBFS (coreboot) support, ZFS LZ4 support, ZFS features support, XFS V5 format support, as well as LVM RAID1 support.

It also ships with various fixes for non-512-byte sector devices, a new "progress" module that displays the boot progress information while reading files, support for DragonFly BSD labels and compressed HFS+ partitions, and a new "proc" filesystem framework that is being used by LUKS encrypted disks.

Improved security, other improvements

GRUB 2.02 improves security by implementing an optional functionality that forces all files read by the core image from disk to have a valid detached digital signature, better handles DM-RAID partitions, and adds a new "nativedisk" command that lets users switch from firmware to native disk drivers.

The terminal, video, network, Coreboot, and platform support was improved as well in this major release of GRUB2, which supports Apple FAT binaries on non-Apple platforms, improves the FreeDOS direct loading support compatibility, enables "linux16" on all x86 platforms, not just BIOS, and adds a new TrueCrypt ISO loader.

multiboot2 boot-services and memory map, and full-file EFI specification are supported as well, and we recommend studying the entire changelog attached below if you're curious to know what else is new in GRUB 2.02, whose source tarball you can download right now from our website if you fancy compiling it on your OS.

GRUB 2.02 Changelog