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

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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 2/8/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.8.6</p>
  19
  20 <p>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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  80 <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  81 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations">
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  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 drivers for additional filesystems.)</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>The ability to specify a configuration file to use at program launch
 165     time via the <tt>-c <tt class="variable">filename</tt></tt>
 166     command-line option.</li>
 167
 168 <li>User-configurable methods of detecting boot loaders:
 169
 170     <ul>
 171     <li>Auto-detection of EFI boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, optical discs, and network boot loaders.</li>
 172     <li>Auto-detection of legacy BIOS boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.</li>
 173     <li>Manually via the configuration file</li>
 174     </ul>
 175
 176     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>
 177
 178 <li>Beginning with rEFInd 0.8.4, <i>experimental</i> network boot loader support via the <a href="http://ipxe.org">iPXE</a> EFI binaries. When activated, rEFInd should add a network-boot option to its menu when a suitable network boot server is available.</li>
 179
 180 <li>Support for launching legacy BIOS boot loaders on UEFI PCs with
 181 suitable CSM support (as of version 0.4.6, with significant improvements in
 182 version 0.8.0). Note that some UEFI PCs,
 183 such as those with Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI, lack a usable CSM.</li>
 184
 185 <li>Improved flexibility in setting the default OS to boot. rEFInd enables specifying the default by any substring in the description. You can also specify multiple defaults, so that if the first isn't available, another will take its place (which is useful when using removable disks). You can also add time specifications to set a default to be used only during certain hours of the day. If no default loader is set, rEFInd defaults to the last-booted loader.</li>
 186
 187 <li>Support for partition names or GUID values as fallbacks for filesystem labels in certain configuration file settings. Partition names may be shown as values to be displayed as part of the descriptive text for boot tags on the main menu, too, if a filesystem has no label.</li>
 188
 189 <li>The ability to fine-tune options passed to EFI boot loaders, via manual configuration.</li>
 190
 191 <li>An option editor to enable you to edit the options passed to an EFI boot loader on a per-boot basis.</li>
 192
 193 <li>The ability to specify additional directories to scan for boot loaders and drivers (as of version 0.2.7).</li>
 194
 195 <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>
 196
 197 <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>
 198
 199 <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>
 200
 201 <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>
 202
 203 <li>Support for icons, selection backgrounds, and banner graphics in PNG format, in addition to the ICNS and BMP formats supported by rEFIt.</li>
 204
 205 <li>Support for full-screen banner images.</li>
 206
 207 <li>Support for scaling icons, to adjust icon size for users with high-resolution displays, poor eyesight, or simply for personal preference reasons.</li>
 208
 209 <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>
 210
 211 <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>
 212
 213 <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>
 214
 215 <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>
 216
 217 <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>
 218
 219 <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>
 220
 221 <li>Fixes to display problems on many UEFI-based PCs.</li>
 222
 223 <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>
 224
 225 <li>Workarounds to file detection bugs in at least one type of UEFI firmware.</li>
 226
 227 <li>Improved detection of itself, to keep rEFInd out of its own boot menu.</li>
 228
 229 <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>
 230
 231 <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>
 232
 233 <li>Drivers for ISO-9660, NTFS, HFS+, ext4fs, and Btrfs, 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, and the Btrfs and NTFS drivers are derived from the rEFIt and GRUB 2.0 driver code.</li>
 234
 235 <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.</li>
 236
 237 <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>
 238
 239 <li>The ability to set the VMX bit on certain Intel CPUs. This feature is necessary for certain virtualization tools, such as Hyper-V, and not all EFIs enable users to set it.</li>
 240
 241 </ul>
 242
 243 <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>
 244
 245 <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>
 246
 247 <hr />
 248
 249 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2015 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 250
 251 <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>
 252
 253 <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>
 254
 255 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 256
 257 <p><a href="getting.html">Learn how to obtain rEFInd</a></p>
 258
 259   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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