GRUB2.12

GNU GRUB is a Multiboot boot loader. It was derived from GRUB, GRand Unified Bootloader, which was originally designed and implemented by Erich Stefan Boleyn.

GNU GRUB is a very powerful boot loader, which can load a wide variety of free operating systems, as well as proprietary operating systems with chain-loading1. GRUB is designed to address the complexity of booting a personal computer; both the program and this manual are tightly bound to that computer platform, although porting to other platforms may be addressed in the future.

One of the important features in GRUB is flexibility; GRUB understands filesystems and kernel executable formats, so you can load an arbitrary operating system the way you like, without recording the physical position of your kernel on the disk. Thus you can load the kernel just by specifying its file name and the drive and partition where the kernel resides.

GRUB 2 is the next generation of GNU GRUB. GRUB 2 is a complete rewrite and is at a developmental phase. The most important goal is to make GNU GRUB cleaner, safer, more robust, more portable and more powerful.