GNU GRUB is a multi-boot loader
After almost two and a half years since the release of version 2.06, the new version of GRUB 2.12, version in which have implemented various support improvements, as well as bug fixes and more.
For those who are unfamiliar with this modular multiplatform boot manager, you should know that GRUB Supports a wide range of platforms, including mainstream PC with BIOS, IEEE-1275 platforms (PowerPC/Sparc64 based hardware), EFI systems, Loongson 2E processor hardware with RISC-V and MIPS support, Itanium, ARM, ARM64 and ARCS (SGI) systems, devices using the free CoreBoot package.
GRUB 2.12 Key New Features
In this new version that is presented added initial support for the bootloader interface (Boot Loader Interface) developed by systemd which has the purpose of receiving performance data and other information, as well as passing control information
Another change that stands out in this new version of GRUB 2.12 is the adding support for the SDL2 media library. The purpose of this improvement has not been detailed, but it is speculated that the purpose is to have the reliability of an image loading and management library, instead of developing one of its own, as well as to have protection against file injection image and avoid something similar to LogoFAIL.
In addition to this, it is also highlighted that ssupport for LoongArch architecture, as well as support for binutils 2.38 was also added support for PCI and MMIO UART and the ability to build using GCC 13 and Clang 14 was implemented.
On the part of the security improvements, fixes for vulnerabilities accumulated since the GRUB 2.06 version have been implemented, such as the CVE-2023-4692 vulnerability that corresponded to a bug in the parsing code of an NTFS attribute, which can be used to write user-controlled information to a memory area outside the allocated buffer, also the CVE- 2023-4693 in the GRUB2 NTFS driver and others.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- The Linux kernel EFI bootloader is unified for all supported architectures.
On x86 systems, the Linux kernel has been transitioned to the EFI bootloader. - Added support for adding memory dynamically by calling drivers in the firmware. Issues in the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) driver have been resolved.
- Fixed many issues in the code for accessing file systems.
- Debugging capabilities have been improved and the test suite has been expanded to ensure more robust and reliable performance.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it about this new version, you can check the details In the following link.
How to install the new version of Grub on Linux?
For those who are interested in being able to install the new version of grub on their system, you should know that Currently the new version is already in the repositories of the distributions, so it is possible, since you have this new version installed.
If you are not sure if you have this new version, just run the update commands for your distribution. For example, in Arch Linux you just have to type:
sudo pacman -Syuu
Or if you just wanted to update or install GRUB, just type:
sudo pacman -S grub
As for those who prefer to compile, they should know that we can obtain the source code from the following link
Now to carry out the compilation we must open a terminal and in it we are going to position ourselves on the folder where we download the source code and we are going to type the following commands:
zcat grub-2.12.tar.gz | tar xvf -cd grub-2.12
./configure
make install
Finally, do not forget to generate the grub.cfg file, this so that the boot loader of your system is configured correctly and includes the latest changes.
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg