GRUB 2.12 Planned For Release This Year, Continues Improving Boot Security

One of the recurring FOSDEM talks we have come to enjoy has been Oracle's Daniel Kiper providing an annual update on the GRUB bootloader development efforts. This past weekend at FOSDEM 2022 was the latest on this leading open-source bootloader with recent accomplishments and plans for this year.

Daniel Kiper provided a great recap for GRUB in 2021 and a look forward to this bootloader in 2022. Over the course of the past year GRUB developers dealt with BootHole and BootHole2 security fixes, working out LUKS2 support, many cryptodisk and other LUKS(2) changes, updating miniLZO support, and a variety of other updates.

GRUB 2.12 is aiming for release around the middle of this calendar year with the latest fixes. GRUB is currently seeing work around support for writing new GRUB modules in the Rust programming language, LoongArch architecture support, TrenchBoot work is currently paused over ongoing design discussions, and more work around encrypted disks as well as confidential computing.

Those wanting to learn more about the GRUB project status can see Kiper's presentation via FOSDEM.org with the PDF slide deck available as well as video recordings from the session.