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7 <title>The rEFInd Boot Manager: rEFInd Features
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12 <h1>The rEFInd Boot Manager:
<br />rEFInd Features
</h1>
14 <p class=
"subhead">by Roderick W. Smith,
<a
15 href=
"mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com
</a></p>
17 <p>Originally written:
3/
14/
2012; last Web page update:
3/
26/
2012, referencing rEFInd
0.2.3</p>
20 <p>I'm a technical writer and consultant specializing in Linux technologies. This Web page is provided free of charge and with no annoying outside ads; however, I did take time to prepare it, and Web hosting does cost money. If you find this Web page useful, please consider making a small donation to help keep this site up and running. Thanks!
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88 <p>This page is part of the documentation for the rEFInd boot manager. If a Web search has brought you here, you may want to start at the
<a href=
"index.html">main page.
</a></p>
92 <p>rEFInd is a fork of the
<a href=
"http://refit.sourceforge.net">rEFIt
</a> boot manager. As such, it has many features in common with rEFIt. These include the following:
</p>
96 <li>Support for both text-mode and graphical operation.
</li>
98 <li>Auto-detection of EFI and BIOS boot loaders.
</li>
100 <li>User-configurable graphics and icons
—you can set your own background, set new icons, and so on.
</li>
102 <li>Launch EFI boot loaders or, on Macs, launch BIOS-based boot loaders. (I have yet to get the BIOS-launching feature to work on a UEFI-based PC, but it might work on a model I don't own.)
</li>
104 <li>Launch options for an EFI shell, disk partitioner, and other optional external components. (See the
<a href=
"installing.html">Installing rEFInd
</a> section for information on how to obtain and install these components.)
</li>
106 <li>Set OS-specific boot options, such as to launch Mac OS X with verbose text-mode debug messages.
</li>
110 <p>I've used rEFIt on a couple of computers for over a year, but I've found that it has some frustrating limitations. It tends to flood the screen with non-functional BIOS boot options, for instance; and it has a number of bugs on UEFI-based systems. I therefore expanded on rEFIt, giving rEFInd features that improve on or go beyond those of rEFIt, such as:
</p>
114 <li>User-configurable methods of detecting boot loaders:
117 <li>Auto-detection of EFI boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.
</li>
118 <li>Auto-detection of BIOS boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.
</li>
119 <li>Manually via the configuration file
</li>
122 You can select which of these methods to use to construct the rEFInd main boot menu. Although rEFIt supports auto-detection, it does not support manual configuration; and rEFIt's options to enable, disable, and prioritize individual boot loader detection methods are primitive compared to those in rEFInd.
</li>
124 <li>The ability to fine-tune options passed to EFI boot loaders, via manual configuration.
</li>
126 <li>Proper handling of more OS options than can fit on the screen. (rEFIt displays an empty list in graphical mode when it detects too many OSes.)
</li>
128 <li>Additional OS icons (all of which are Linux distributions, at least so far). This can make it easier to find a specific distribution in the boot list if you've installed multiple Linux distributions.
</li>
130 <li>The ability to auto-detect Linux initial RAM disk files and to read Linux kernel options from a
<tt>linux.conf
</tt> file. These features support (nearly) automatic handling of Linux kernels with embedded EFI stub loader support (a new feature with Linux
3.3.0).
</li>
132 <li>Fixes to display problems on many UEFI-based PCs.
</li>
134 <li>Workarounds to file detection bugs in at least one type of UEFI firmware.
</li>
136 <li>Improved detection of itself, to keep rEFInd out of its own boot menu.
</li>
140 <p>On the flip side, at least for Mac users, rEFInd comes with less sophisticated Mac installation tools than does rEFIt, in favor of more OS-agnostic packaging. Also, rEFInd doesn't support loading EFI drivers; that job should be done in other ways when using rEFInd.
</p>
142 <p>If these features sound useful, then read on and try rEFInd. If not, you may need to look elsewhere. My
<a href=
"http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html">Managing EFI Boot Loaders for Linux
</a> page may be useful to you in this case.
</p>
146 <p>copyright
© 2012 by Roderick W. Smith
</p>
148 <p>This document is licensed under the terms of the
<a href=
"FDL-1.3.txt">GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version
1.3.
</a></p>
150 <p>If you have problems with or comments about this Web page, please e-mail me at
<a href=
"mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com.
</a> Thanks.
</p>
152 <p><a href=
"index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page
</a></p>
154 <p><a href=
"getting.html">Learn how to obtain rEFInd
</a></p>
156 <p><a href=
"http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return
</a> to my main Web page.
</p>