GRUB 2.06 Should Be Released This Year, Cooperation Increasing With Distro Vendors

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GRUB 2.06 Should Be Released This Year, Cooperation Increasing With Distro Vendors

While GRUB 2.06 was aiming for release in 2020, having to deal with the BootHole security issue among other challenges last year ended up delaying that release. Fortunately, it looks like this long awaited GRUB feature update should be out this year and there has been increased cooperation between upstream GRUB developers and distribution vendors...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GRUB-In-2021

[tildearrow]

GRUB 2.06 is finally under its code freeze and the first release candidate has been ready since Decembered but delayed over translations build issues. Ideally we will see GRUB 2.06 buttoned up and released this year.

I never thoughted that was a month..

[Danny3]

The only thing that I would want from GRUB developers to add is a way to easily reboot into another OS or kernel that works on any kind of motherboard, not only on UEFI ones.
I can do it already with GRUB customizer tool by setting one of the entries as default, but that makes it permanent for all the subsequent reboots and I don't like it.
It would be great to have a reboot button in my DE with the list of all GRUB entries to choose and after I choose one, I can go in the meantime to take something from the fridge or to the toilet and not waste that time to wait for the computer to reboot, show GRUB menu and then choose the OS I want.
A computer should be smarter than it was in the 90s and should let me automate more things.

Another use case is when I'm connected remotely to my dualboot computer and I want to access something in Windows I cannot do it as I don't have access to GRUB remotely to choose the entry that I want.

I can set again Windows to be the default through GRUB customizer, but after I'm done with Windows I cannot go back in Linux anymore as I don't have any program on Windows to edit GRUB again and make Linux the default for reboot.

It's so strange to me that such a basic feature is not yet available in Linux.

Even my Android (LineageOS) phone as an "Advanced" restart feature which I activated and now I can choose 3 actions after restart, like rebooting into "Download mode", "Recovery" and "System"

[loganj]

Danny3 thats probably already possible. not sure for windows but for linux it sure is. i guess you didn't even try to google for it

[shmerl]

Does Debian installer already support using LUKS+LVM and GRUB without making a separate boot partition? In the past it was a pain to set up. Debian installer only supported making an unencrypted boot partition and putting LUKS on the rest.

[syrjala]

grub-reboot is a thing. But the one thing it would really need is an interactive mode that shows you the fricking boot menu and lets you select the entry that way. Who the heck remembers what the names/indexes of the boot entries are (especially with that stupid submenu stuff that's enabled by default)?

[wsxy162]

Danny3 Not the same purpose, you may try the option GRUB_DEFAULT=saved.

[royce]

Does Debian installer already support using LUKS+LVM and GRUB without making a separate boot partition? In the past it was a pain to set up. Debian installer only supported making an unencrypted boot partition and putting LUKS on the rest.

This is still the case. As far as I can tell this new version of GRUB will make this step superfluous. I don't know how this is going to play with flicker-free boot screens though, as grub itself should be asking for your password.

[shmerl]

This is still the case. As far as I can tell this new version of GRUB will make this step superfluous. I don't know how this is going to play with flicker-free boot screens though, as grub itself should be asking for your password.

OK, I hope Debian installer developers will catch up on this. Separate boot partition is annoying and unnecessary.

[mppix]

OK, I hope Debian installer developers will catch up on this. Separate boot partition is annoying and unnecessary.

Unlikely for Debian 11 but maybe we'll see it some time after the freeze.