GRUB-2.00

[bdubbs@…]

​http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-2.00.tar.xz

This is a pretty major update.

• Appearence:
  • Official theme for gfxmenu (starfield)
  • Menu is organised with submenus.
  • Better default video mode selection using EDID.

• New platforms:
  • Itanium port.
  • Fuloong2F support (including GRUB as firmware)
  • Fuloong2E support (except GRUB as firmware)
  • ARCS (SGI machines) port.
  • qemu -M mips port.

• grub-mount to mount filesystems using GRUB FS drivers and FUSE.

• Changed security default so entries are locked by default if any

superuser is defined.

• New drivers:
  • EHCI.
  • AHCI.
  • ESCC serial.
  • IEEE1275 serial.
  • EFI serial.
  • Network stack for BIOS, IEEE1275, EMU and EFI, including TFTP, HTTP and DNS.
  • VBE on coreboot support.

• New filesystem, filters and disks formats:
  • DVH partition map.
  • Plan9 partition map.
  • Big-endian mdraid.
  • Big-endian cpio.
  • ODC and NEWC cpio.
  • ExFAT.
  • Minix3fs.
  • Big-endian minixfs.
  • RomFS.
  • Squash4.
  • Support non-512B disk blocks.
  • LUKS and GELI support.
  • LDM read support (no install yet).
  • LZOP.

• Improved filesystem and disks formats support:
  • HFS+ label support.
  • Improved reiserfs support.
  • multidevice, mirrored and raidz(2,3) ZFS support.
  • RAID LVM (internal RAIDing) support.
  • ZFS crypto support.
  • ZLE and GZIP on ZFS support.
  • Support ZFS up to 33.
  • HFS string is now treated like mac-roman and not UTF-8
  • HFS mtime support.
  • Improved AFFS and SFS support.
  • LZO-compressed btrfs support.
  • cpio and tar symlinks support.
  • Better FS detection to reduce false positives.

• New boot protocols:
  • Ability to load another coreboot payload when on coreboot.
  • Plan9.
  • Freedos.
  • Ntldr/bootmgr (to load Windows bootloader).
  • chainloader --bpb support to patch FAT or NTFS BPB in memory to correct wrong partition offset.
  • PXE chainloading support.
  • Darwin 11 (Mac OS X Lion) protocol support.

• Boot protocol improvements:
  • Multiple initrd support.
  • Basic illumos and xnu autoconfig.

• Testing and debugging:
  • New grub-fstest commands: cat, zfsinfo, testload xnu_uuid
  • grub-fstest recursive directory compare for quickly checking that a directory is read correctly.
  • Backtace on crash (if gdb module is loaded, x86 only)
  • Disk cache statistics gathering.
  • GDB stub and GDB support script.
  • "make check" and "make bootcheck" expanded to almost all platforms (except i386-ieee1275, mips-arc, sparc64-ieee1275, ia64-efi and emu)
  • New `time' command.

• Performance:
  • Lazy scanning to avoid accessing devices which aren't really used. This avoids boot delay due to slow device scanning.
  • Use CPU cache when accessing video memory.
  • Search hints to first try the most likely device when searching for a device with given UUID. This avoids slow scanning in most cases.

• Internationalisation:
  • Updated to Unicode 6.0.
  • $"..." syntax for translation in grub scripting language. This allows easy translation of grub.cfg at runtime.
  • Translations to many languages included in official distribution.

• Scripting:
  • $grub_cpu and $grub_platform variables for conditioning grub.cfg on platform at runtime.
  • $feature_* variables to condition scripts on available features.
  • Use of ids to identify menu entries.
  • all_video module which is empty but depends on all video modules thus allowing easy loading of all of them.

• Installation:
  • grub-mknetdir script for easy creation of netbootable GRUB directory.
  • Itanium and mips support in grub-mkrescue.
  • grub-install support for all platforms except emu.
  • PreP partition install support.
  • No files conflict between flavours (except grub-mkrescue for ppc). This allows easy install of GRUB for several platforms.
  • grub-mkstandalone script for easy creating of image including all modules for platforms with generous limit on image size.
  • program-transform-name now functions according to usual conventions. Use --grubdir and --bootdir to get old behaviour.

• ADLER32 and CRC64 support (for XZ and hashsum).

• ofconsole renamed to console

• Experimental support for compiling with Apple toolchain.

• grub-mkdevicemap removed. Now all devices are detected on invocation of any grub utility.

[bdubbs@…]

Fixed at revision 9898.

It turns out that the changes were minimal. The build no longer needs --diable-werror and a note in the grub setup about /dev/root is no longer needed. Most other things stayed the same.