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GRUB 2.00 Bootloader Officially Released
An anonymous reader writes "After being in development for more than a decade, GRUB2 was released today as stable. The mailing list announcement covers new features including a standard theme, support for new file-systems, ports to new CPU architectures, new driver coverage, better EFI support, and many other new features that have materialized over the years of development to succeed GRUB Legacy."
Ubuntu is using grub2 as default since 9.10. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2
I might agree with you had GRUB ever failed me. :)
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Not for long, though.
Does it install correctly on /dev/mapper RAID drives?
I agree. LILO has a simplicity that GRUB lack, and LILO beat-out GRUB for GPT partition table support for a long, long, long, long time... ie. GRUB v1 doesn't officially have GPT support (it's always 3rd party patches) and GRUB2 is just NOW becoming stable!
But LILO hasn't seen much development or interest. If something is going to take over for GRUB, I'd expect it would be extlinux: http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/EXTLINUX
Besides getting active development, it's also about as flexible as grub, and completely syntax-compatible with syslinux / isolinux / pxelinux, and all the other bootloaders any pros are going to need to figure out how to configure at some point in their careers... Replacing GRUB with extlinux gets all our bootloaders the same config syntax, without sacrificing anything but GRUB's eccentricities.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yes, UEFI Secure Boot means precisely that: you can't use any Linux but Red Hat and Ubuntu, official kernels only. Microsoft agreed to sign their official kernels to have more ammunition in the inevitable antitrust suit. A pox on Ubuntu for cooperating here!
GPL3 on Grub works as designed here: it stops any DRM, disallowing unmodifiable bootloaders and kernels.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
To boot in non secure mode:
- yup, GRUB2 does support EFI.
To boot in secure-mode:
- technically yes, practically not so easy.
To boot in secure-mode, GRUB2 need to be signed.
As per GPLv3, GRUB2 needs to publish the private key, so any one could rebuilt his/her very own version of GRUB2, sign it, and replace the previous one.
But due to the way microsoft license its keys and signing, GRUB won't be allowed to publish said key, thus can't abid GPLv3. Thus no version of GRUB2 signed with microsoft key.
Then two other possibilities remain:
- Canonical will get efilinux signed with microsoft keys. So GRUB2 has to be made bootable from efillinux (efilinux is rather primitive, it just loads a kernel from a set collection of blocks from the device and run it. It shouldn't be too much difficult to have efilinux load and execute a GRUB2's "stage 1.5" or "stage 2").
Thus efilinux is the part that needs to be signed with microsoft's key (and efilinux's license makes it possible. Although that also means that you won't be able to hack it).
- Canonical is trying to setup its own scheme of signing, a much more open-source friendly way. And trying to get motherboard manufacturer to include canonical's signing keys into the mobo's secure boot.
On motherboards that feature also Canonical's key, one could use a GRUB2 binary signed with canonical's key. As per GPLv3: canonical needs to provide some way so an end user can sign his/her new custom version of GRUB2 to replace the original own.
Now the funny part:
- GRUB2 can load coreboot (an opensource firmware) payloads, so it could also load SeaBIOS (a legacy BIOS implementation as a coreboot payload).
- GRUB2 can also load windows XP's boot loader.
So if any of the above is possible (either chainloading efilinux to grub2, or signing grub2 in a gplv3 compatible way). That means that grub2 could be used to boot windows XP on secure-boot hardware. (with seabios providing the legacy bios compatibility, and windows XP's ntldfr being loaded from grub2).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In the announcement they said GRUB 2.00 supports FreeDOS as a boot protocol. I'll have to test that out to see what they mean - it's not that hard to boot DOS. But I am thrilled that the GRUB developers recognized us with explicit support. And of course, all the extra technical details they've added in the 2.00 release. Thanks!
Also, I saw that GRUB 2.00 supports a few other "alternative" operating systems, including Ntldr/bootmgr (to load Windows bootloader) and Darwin 11 (Mac OS X Lion.)
Either way, it stops making sense after the next comma (splice). It should be a semicolon. And the comma after that one shouldn't be there at all.
Sincerely,
The Helpful Grammarian
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
GRUB2 is cabable of mounting ISO images and loading contained kernels.
That means you can save unmodified liveCD ISO images on a boot partition with GRUB2 and load them directly. /bar.
This is not a CD or DVD emulator but simply loopback access, as if you'd mount it in Linux with mount -o loop foo.iso
If you want to retain the individual boot menus of your liveCDs, you need to recreate them with GRUB2 syntax.
Fortunately some, albeit very few, live CDs ship with a loopback.cfg for this purpose nowadays.
Off the top of my head, new Ubuntu releases and GRML do so. GRML was one of the first.
http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2011/01/07/booting-iso-images-from-within-grub2/
http://www.supergrubdisk.org/wiki/Loopback.cfg
http://grml.org/
Linux has taken years of hard work to get to the point where you can just put a disk in and install it, without having to screw around with the BIOS or other low level stuff. It seems a step backwards to require users go into the firmware config (A scarey place for the newbie!) and change things. Also, there is no assurance that Microsoft will grant users that luxury indefinatly - it's quite possible that they'll change their policy in Windows 10 or 11 to remove that option altogether, as soon as they feel they can get away without another antitrust case.