code.delx.au - refind/blob - docs/refind/features.html

   1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
   2 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
   3   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
   4
   5 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
   6 <head>
   7   <title>The rEFInd Boot Manager: rEFInd Features</title>
   8   <link href="../Styles/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
   9 </head>
  10
  11 <body>
  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 6/18/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.12</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>
  21
  22 <table border="1">
  23 <tr>
  24 <td>Donate $1.00</td>
  25 <td>Donate $2.50</td>
  26 <td>Donate $5.00</td>
  27 <td>Donate $10.00</td>
  28 <td>Donate $20.00</td>
  29 <td>Donate another value</td>
  30 </tr>
  31 <tr>
  32
  33 <td>
  34 <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  35 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations">
  36 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
  37 <input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">
  38 <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="0">
  39 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
  40 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="1.00">
  41 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
  42 <input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF:btn_donate_LG.gif:NonHostedGuest">
  43 <input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
  44 <img alt="Donate with PayPal" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
  45 </form>
  46 </td>
  47
  48 <td>
  49 <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  50 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations">
  51 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
  52 <input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">
  53 <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="0">
  54 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
  55 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="2.50">
  56 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
  57 <input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF:btn_donate_LG.gif:NonHostedGuest">
  58 <input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
  59 <img alt="Donate with PayPal" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
  60 </form>
  61 </td>
  62
  63
  64 <td>
  65 <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  66 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations">
  67 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
  68 <input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">
  69 <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="0">
  70 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
  71 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="5.00">
  72 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
  73 <input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF:btn_donate_LG.gif:NonHostedGuest">
  74 <input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
  75 <img alt="Donate with PayPal" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
  76 </form>
  77 </td>
  78
  79 <td>
  80 <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  81 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations">
  82 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
  83 <input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">
  84 <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="0">
  85 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
  86 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="10.00">
  87 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
  88 <input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF:btn_donate_LG.gif:NonHostedGuest">
  89 <input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
  90 <img alt="Donate with PayPal" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
  91 </form>
  92 </td>
  93
  94 <td>
  95 <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  96 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations">
  97 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
  98 <input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">
  99 <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="0">
 100 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
 101 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="20.00">
 102 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
 103 <input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF:btn_donate_LG.gif:NonHostedGuest">
 104 <input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
 105 <img alt="Donate with PayPal" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
 106 </form>
 107 </td>
 108
 109 <td>
 110 <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
 111 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations">
 112 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
 113 <input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">
 114 <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="0">
 115 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
 116 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
 117 <input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF:btn_donate_LG.gif:NonHostedGuest">
 118 <input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
 119 <img alt="Donate with PayPal" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
 120 </form>
 121 </td></tr>
 122 </table>
 123
 124 <hr />
 125
 126 <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>
 127
 128 <hr />
 129
 130 <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>
 131
 132 <ul>
 133
 134 <li>Support for both text-mode and graphical operation.</li>
 135
 136 <li>Auto-detection of EFI and BIOS boot loaders.</li>
 137
 138 <li>User-configurable graphics and icons&mdash;you can set your own background, set new icons, and so on.</li>
 139
 140 <li>Launch EFI boot loaders.</li>
 141
 142 <li>Launch legacy (BIOS) boot loaders on Macs. (rEFInd also supports legacy boots on some UEFI PCs; see below.)</li>
 143
 144 <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>
 145
 146 <li>Provide the <tt>gptsync</tt> utility for creating hybrid MBRs. Note that rEFInd's version of <tt>gptsync</tt> is significantly updated compared to rEFIt's. Also, this tool should be used only on Macs that dual-boot with a BIOS-based OS, such as Windows; or <i>very</i> rarely on other computers.</li>
 147
 148 <li>Set OS-specific boot options, such as to launch Mac OS X with verbose text-mode debug messages.</li>
 149
 150 <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>
 151
 152 <li>Inclusion of drivers for the Linux ReiserFS and ext2 filesystems in the
 153     main package. (These drivers are absent from rEFInd prior to version
 154     0.4.0. See below concerning an ext4fs driver.)</li>
 155
 156 </ul>
 157
 158 <p>rEFInd expands on rEFIt by providing features that improve on or go beyond those of rEFIt, such as:</p>
 159
 160 <ul>
 161
 162 <li>Bug fixes, focusing on those that have bothered me personally.</li>
 163
 164 <li>User-configurable methods of detecting boot loaders:
 165
 166     <ul>
 167     <li>Auto-detection of EFI boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.</li>
 168     <li>Auto-detection of legacy BIOS boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.</li>
 169     <li>Manually via the configuration file</li>
 170     </ul>
 171
 172     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>
 173
 174 <li>Support for launching legacy BIOS boot loaders on UEFI PCs with
 175 suitable CSM support (as of version 0.4.6). This feature requires building
 176 rEFInd with the TianoCore EDK2 toolkit, which I do for my main binary
 177 build. Note that some UEFI PCs, such as those with Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI,
 178 lack a usable CSM.</li>
 179
 180 <li>The ability to fine-tune options passed to EFI boot loaders, via manual configuration.</li>
 181
 182 <li>An option editor to enable you to edit the options passed to an EFI boot loader on a per-boot basis.</li>
 183
 184 <li>The ability to specify additional directories to scan for boot loaders and drivers (as of version 0.2.7).</li>
 185
 186 <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>
 187
 188 <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>
 189
 190 <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>
 191
 192 <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>
 193
 194 <li>Support for icons, selection backgrounds, and banner graphics in PNG format, in addition to the ICNS and BMP formats supported by rEFIt.</li>
 195
 196 <li>Support for full-screen banner images.</li>
 197
 198 <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>
 199
 200 <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>
 201
 202 <li>Additional OS icons (most 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>
 203
 204 <li>Beginning with version 0.6.6, support for loading user-defined fonts, in the form of PNG files containing ASCII characters 32 through 126 plus a glyph to be used for values outside that range.</li>
 205
 206 <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>
 207
 208 <li>In the absence of a <tt>refind_linux.conf</tt> file, the ability to pass minimal Linux boot options to a kernel based on the contents of <tt>/etc/fstab</tt>. This is limited to cases in which the kernel resides on the Linux root (<tt>/</tt>) filesystem, though, and it won't work if the installation requires any unusual options.</li>
 209
 210 <li>Fixes to display problems on many UEFI-based PCs.</li>
 211
 212 <li>Beginning with version 0.6.10, a screen saver feature, activated by the <tt>screensaver <tt class="variable">seconds</tt></tt> token in <tt>refind.conf</tt>: Set <tt class="variable">seconds</tt> to the number of seconds before the screen will blank to prevent burn-in.</li>
 213
 214 <li>Workarounds to file detection bugs in at least one type of UEFI firmware.</li>
 215
 216 <li>Improved detection of itself, to keep rEFInd out of its own boot menu.</li>
 217
 218 <li>Detection of a fallback boot loader (<tt>EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi</tt> or <tt>EFI/BOOT/bootia32.efi</tt>) that's redundant with another boot loader, to keep the fallback boot loader out of menus when it's unnecessary.</li>
 219
 220 <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>
 221
 222 <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>
 223
 224 <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>
 225
 226 <li>The <tt>gptsync</tt> utility, included with rEFInd 0.6.9 and later, has safety checks to prevent creating a fresh hybrid MBR if the MBR side has been adjusted without adjusting the GPT side&mdash;a common source of problems. This update also prioritizes partition inclusion in the hybrid MBR, which can help on disks that have many partitions. OTOH, as of rEFInd 0.6.9, this version of <tt>gptsync</tt> is relatively untested.</li>
 227
 228 </ul>
 229
 230 <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>
 231
 232 <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>
 233
 234 <hr />
 235
 236 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 237
 238 <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>
 239
 240 <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>
 241
 242 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 243
 244 <p><a href="getting.html">Learn how to obtain rEFInd</a></p>
 245
 246   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
 247 </body>
 248 </html>