GRUB 2.04 Should Be Released Later This Year

It's been nine months since the release of GRUB 2.02 while the GRUB 2.04 stable release should be out by year's end.

GRUB developer and one of the upstream maintainers Daniel Kiper who works for Oracle provided an update on GRUB2 development at this weekend's FOSDEM event in Brussels.

Under review for GRUB 2.04 is a new verifiers framework for adding TPM support and UEFI Secure Boot support within GRUB. There is also Xen PVH support that might make the GRUB 2.04 release that is still waiting review.

There are also various extensions and fixes for GRUB2 on ARM / ARM64 / SPARC and plenty of general fixes. The current thinking is that GRUB 2.04 could ship in the second half of 2018.

Future work talked about for the GRUB boot-loader include a better patch review process, reducing the amount of customizations needed and custom patches by some distributions in order to make GRUB2 fit their needs, improve cooperation with distributions, and introduce automatic testing of GRUB2 code.

For those that missed the brief presentation, Kiper's slides can be found here.