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ssanj
Asked: 2010-08-05 00:03:11 +0800 CST

What are the benefits of using Grub2 over Grub?

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Why would one move from Grub to Grub2?

grub2

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    GRUB 2's major improvements over the original GRUB include:

    • New configuration file structure
    • Scripting support including conditional statements and functions
    • Dynamic module loading
    • Rescue mode
    • Themes
    • Graphical boot menu support and improved splash capability
    • Boot Ubuntu LiveCD and some other ISO images directly from hard drive
    • Non-X86 platform support (such as PowerPC)
    • Universal support for UUIDs (not just Ubuntu)
    • Improved internationalization, including support for non-ASCII characters
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  2. Grub legacy is no longer being maintained, so distros would have to do all the work of patching it to support newer file systems like Ext4 and btrfs. That's a lot of really unnecessary work for them, and diverts dev time away from doing more useful things.

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  3. This question is not really relevant anymore, since Ubuntu 9.10 and later already have GRUB2 installed.

    sudo update-grub just has still prevailed as the standard command.

    sudo update-grub and sudo update-grub2 are equivalent, so it doesn't matter which one you run. /usr/sbin/update-grub2 is just a symbolic link to /usr/sbin/update-grub.

    There are no relevant benefits for the end-user. Only developers and distribution-maintainers benefit from grub2 over grub (see yevhenes answer)

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