GRUB 2

Currently under development, GRUB 2 has replaced what was formerly known as GRUB (i.e. version 0.9x), which has, in turn, become GRUB Legacy. GRUB 2 has been rewritten from scratch to clean up everything for modularity and portability.

GRUB 2 targets at the following goals:

• Scripting support, such as conditionals, loops, variables and functions.
• Graphical interface.
• Dynamic loading of modules in order to extend itself at the run time rather than at the build time.
• Portability for various architectures.
• Internationalization. This includes support for non-ASCII character code, message catalogs like gettext, fonts, graphics console, and so on.
• Real memory management, to make GNU GRUB more extensible.
• Modular, hierarchical, object-oriented framework for file systems, files, devices, drives, terminals, commands, partition tables and OS loaders.
• Cross-platform installation which allows for installing GRUB from a different architecture.
• Rescue mode saves unbootable cases. Stage 1.5 was eliminated.
• Fix design mistakes in GRUB Legacy, which could not be solved for backward-compatibility, such as the way of numbering partitions.