Vladimir Serbinenko has announced the release of Grub 2. Grub is the default boot-loader for majority of GNU/Linux based systems. The next major release has come at a time when Ubuntu has decided to ditch Grub 2 for Intel's efilinux loader in order to use UEFI secure boot.

The Grub 2, for the first time, includes an official theme (starfield). This is also the first time Grub has released itanium and SGI mips port. It now features an EHCI, AHCI, ESCC serial and a range of other drivers as well as new appearance changes like submenus in menus and better video selection mode using EDID. Among the new platforms, as we said earlier, GRUB has an Itanium port, Fuloong2F support (including GRUB as firmware), Fuloong2E support (except GRUB as firmware),  ARCS (SGI machines) port and qemu -M mips port. You now will be able to mount file systems using GRUB FS drivers and FUSE.

GRUB 2.00 adds new file system support for DVH partition map. Plan9 partition map, ExFAT, Minix3fs, RomFS, Squash4 and more. Also file system support for HFS+ label, reiserfs, multi-device, mirrored  ZFS, RAID LVM have been improved greatly. This release has better file system detection to reduce false positives.