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   7   <title>The rEFInd Boot Manager: rEFInd Features</title>
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  12   <h1>The rEFInd Boot Manager:<br />rEFInd Features</h1>
  13
  14 <p class="subhead">by Roderick W. Smith, <a
  15 href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
  16
  17 <p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
  18 12/30/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.6.2</p>
  19
  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!</p>
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  85
  86 <hr />
  87
  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>
  89
  90 <hr />
  91
  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>
  93
  94 <ul>
  95
  96 <li>Support for both text-mode and graphical operation.</li>
  97
  98 <li>Auto-detection of EFI and BIOS boot loaders.</li>
  99
 100 <li>User-configurable graphics and icons&mdash;you can set your own background, set new icons, and so on.</li>
 101
 102 <li>Launch EFI boot loaders.</li>
 103
 104 <li>Launch legacy (BIOS) boot loaders on Macs. (rEFInd also supports legacy boots on some UEFI PCs; see below.)</li>
 105
 106 <li>Launch options for an external EFI shell or disk partitioner. (See the <a href="installing.html">Installing rEFInd</a> section for information on how to obtain and install these components.)</li>
 107
 108 <li>Set OS-specific boot options, such as to launch Mac OS X with verbose text-mode debug messages.</li>
 109
 110 <li>Load EFI drivers for filesystems or hardware devices not supported natively by your firmware. (This feature is absent in some builds of rEFIt and in rEFInd prior to version 0.2.7.)</li>
 111
 112 <li>Inclusion of drivers for the Linux ReiserFS, ext2 filesystems in the
 113     main package. (These drivers are absent from rEFInd prior to version
 114     0.4.0. See below concerning an ext4fs driver.)</li>
 115
 116 </ul>
 117
 118 <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>
 119
 120 <ul>
 121
 122 <li>Bug fixes, focusing on those that have bothered me personally, such as those I've just mentioned.</li>
 123
 124 <li>User-configurable methods of detecting boot loaders:
 125
 126     <ul>
 127     <li>Auto-detection of EFI boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.</li>
 128     <li>Auto-detection of legacy BIOS boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.</li>
 129     <li>Manually via the configuration file</li>
 130     </ul>
 131
 132     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>
 133
 134 <li>Support for launching legacy BIOS boot loaders on UEFI PCs with
 135 suitable CSM support (as of version 0.4.6). This feature requires building
 136 rEFInd with the TianoCore EDK2 toolkit, which I do for my main binary
 137 build. Note that some UEFI PCs, such as those with Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI,
 138 lack a usable CSM.</li>
 139
 140 <li>The ability to fine-tune options passed to EFI boot loaders, via manual configuration.</li>
 141
 142 <li>An option editor to enable you to edit the options passed to an EFI boot loader on a per-boot basis.</li>
 143
 144 <li>The ability to specify additional directories to scan for boot loaders and drivers (as of version 0.2.7).</li>
 145
 146 <li>The ability to specify volumes and directories to <i>not</i> be scanned for boot loaders, even if they would ordinarily be scanned (as of version 0.6.0 for volumes and 0.4.2 for directories).</li>
 147
 148 <li>The ability to re-scan boot loaders, to assist when changing removable media or after making a change to the configuration file with an EFI shell (as of version 0.3.5).</li>
 149
 150 <li>A configurable delay before scanning for boot loaders, for systems on which there's a delay before disks become available (as of version 0.4.6).</li>
 151
 152 <li>The ability to specify an additional icon storage directory, to assist in efforts to customize rEFInd's appearance (as of version 0.3.4).</li>
 153
 154 <li>The ability to set the screen's graphics resolution, within limits imposed by the EFI (as of rEFInd 0.3.0). Similarly, as of version 0.6.0, you can specify the text-mode resolution.</li>
 155
 156 <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>
 157
 158 <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>
 159
 160 <li>The ability to auto-detect Linux initial RAM disk files and to read Linux kernel options from a <tt>refind_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>
 161
 162 <li>Fixes to display problems on many UEFI-based PCs.</li>
 163
 164 <li>Workarounds to file detection bugs in at least one type of UEFI firmware.</li>
 165
 166 <li>Improved detection of itself, to keep rEFInd out of its own boot menu.</li>
 167
 168 <li>An "exit" option (disabled by default), so that you can return to whatever shell or boot manager you used to launch rEFInd, should this ability be desirable. (This feature first appeared in rEFInd 0.2.4.)</li>
 169
 170 <li>Drivers for ISO-9660, HFS+, and ext4fs, which are not included in rEFIt. (The ISO-9660 driver is based on code from the rEFIt project, but was never completed by its original author. It was completed by Oracle for VirtualBox. The ext4fs driver is derived from the rEFIt ext2fs driver.)</li>
 171
 172 <li>Beginning with version 0.5.0, the ability to "talk" to the <a href="http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20303.html">shim boot loader</a> to validate binaries supported by shim or its machine owner key (MOK) list when booting with Secure Boot active. As of version 0.6.0, this support is still crude and buggy; it should be considered an alpha-level feature at the moment.</li>
 173
 174 </ul>
 175
 176 <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.</p>
 177
 178 <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>
 179
 180 <hr />
 181
 182 <p>copyright &copy; 2012 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 183
 184 <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>
 185
 186 <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>
 187
 188 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 189
 190 <p><a href="getting.html">Learn how to obtain rEFInd</a></p>
 191
 192   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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