As somewhat of an annual tradition for the FOSDEM conference, Daniel Kiper of Oracle presented a status update on the GRUB bootloader. As one of the GRUB maintainers he offers great insight to activity around this most common Linux bootloader.
Daniel Kiper was at FOSDEM 2025 last weekend in Brussels to talk about the ongoing GRUB improvements ahead of the next release. Some of the features added to GRUB over the course of 2024 included EROFS file-system support, an optional means of disabling CLI access and editing of GRUB menu entries when the GRUB image is built to specifically disallow such support, Core NX support for EFI platforms, SBAT support for ELF files, and more.
Some of the currently ongoing initiatives in the GRUB world include shim loader protocol support for EFI platforms, TrenchBoot support for Intel/AMD x86 hardware, BLS and UKI support, and more.
The plan is for the next code freeze and GRUB release to happen in the coming months of 2025. Those wanting to find out more about the current GRUB project happenings can see this FOSDEM presentation page for all the assets.
For those interested and somewhat related, Daniel Kiper and Maciej Pijanowski presented an update on the TrenchBoot project too for securing the boot process. Those details here while the AMD and Intel patches for TrenchBoot remain under review.
