Vladimir Serbinenko announced today on the gnu mailing list the official release of Grub 2.00.  Grub is arguably the best piece of software in the world for managing several operating systems at boot time.

I'm proud to announce the release of GNU GRUB version 2.00.

Since this version has a round number it has been paid special attention
to, and hopefully, represents higher quality.

This is the first time we include an official theme (starfield).

This version also includes EHCI driver.

This release is a very important one since it introduces the all-new EHCI driver, which Red-Hat and Canonical will be using to works itself onto forth-coming Microsoft certified hardware.

This release widens support for more file-systems and disks than ever before, with improved handling of RAID, Apple’s aging HFS+ and various other encoding odds-and-ends.  Increased support for encryption also attempts to catch some of the spotlight.

File System and Encryption

* 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.

Drivers

* 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.

For a complete list of changes, check out the official annoucement.  As per usual, you should expect this release to hit packagers hands everywhere in time for upcoming releases of your respective distributions.

Source | gnu Mailing List