GRUB 2.12 had been talked about for a mid-2022 release while one year later we are finally greeted by the first release candidate for this next major open-source bootloader release.

GRUB 2.12 is to succeed the GRUB 2.06 stable series while on Monday marked the GRUB 2.12-rc1 release. GRUB 2.06 released in June of 2021 and since then this leading open-source bootloader has seen numerous improvements. Among the changes coming with GRUB 2.12 are security fixes, LoongArch CPU support, various encryption-related improvements, better RISC-V architecture support, memory leak fixes, improving file-system support for the likes of Btrfs and XFS, and many other improvements.

Hopefully the stable GRUB 2.12 release won't be too far out now while those wishing to test the release candidate can find them via Git on GNU.org .