After two years of development, the GNU GRUB project has presented a stable release of the modular multi-platform boot manager GNU GRUB 2.14 (GRand Unified Bootloader). The GRUB supports a wide range of platforms, including regular PCs with BIOS, IEEE-1275 platforms, EFI systems, systems with RISC-V, Loongson, Itanium, ARM, ARM64, LoongArch, and ARCS processors, as well as devices using the free CoreBoot package. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv3 license.
Some of the basic innovations introduced in this release include:
- Added support for data integrity monitoring in LVM logical volumes (LVM LV) using dm-integrity.
- Added support for configurations utilizing LVM cachevol to enhance access speed to slow disks by caching data on fast drives.
- Introduced support for the EROFS (Extendable Read-Only File System) file system developed by Huawei for read-only partitions. EROFS simplifies structure by eliminating certain metadata areas during implementation and supports compressed data storage with a performance-optimized approach for accessing random data.
- Added the ability to place a block with GRUB environment variables in the reserved header area of the Btrfs file system, allowing storage of information about the default boot partition.
- Added support for running EFI GRUB images in NX (No Execute) protection mode, preventing the execution of
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