The rEFInd Boot Manager:
Configuring the Boot Manager

by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com

Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 5/20/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.0

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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 main page.

Many casual users will be able to use rEFInd without making further changes; in its default configuration, the boot manager automatically detects all the EFI boot loader programs you have on your ESP (or your OS X boot partition, in the case of Macs) and displays icons for them. Sometimes, though, you may want to tweak rEFInd's configuration. Sometimes you can obtain your desired results by adjusting the filenames of your boot loaders. Other times, you can edit rEFInd's configuration file, refind.conf, which resides in the same directory as its binary file (refind.efi or whatever you've renamed it).

Broadly speaking, rEFInd's configuration file is broken down into two sections: global options and OS stanzas. The global options section sets options that apply globally—to set the timeout period, enable graphics or text mode, and so on. OS stanzas are optional, but if present, they enable you to add new boot options or replace the auto-detected options with customized ones. Both sections include configuration lines and comment lines, the latter being denoted by a leading hash mark (#). rEFInd ignores comment lines, so you can add explanatory text. The default configuration file includes numerous comments explaining each of the options.

Hiding and Displaying EFI Boot Loaders

ESPs use the FAT filesystem, which is case-insensitive. Unfortunately, at least one EFI implementation (Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI) contains a bug that causes string comparisons that should be case-insensitive to actually be done in a case-sensitive way. This can cause files that are present to appear to be missing. rEFInd includes code to work around this bug in some situations, but not in all of them. If boot loaders appear to be missing, try changing the case on their filenames or on the EFI directory in the ESP. (It's coded as uppercase in rEFInd; but EFI loader filename extensions are coded as lowercase .efi. I made these choices because they seem to be the most common uses on real-world installations.)

Before delving into the configuration file, you should be aware of what you can do by renaming files. By default, rEFInd scans all the filesystems it can read for boot loaders. It scans most of the subdirectories of the EFI directory on every filesystem it can access for files with names that end in .efi. (rEFIt gives special treatment to the TOOLS subdirectory, where it looks for system tools rather than boot loaders.)

If you're like me, you may sometimes want to hide a boot loader from rEFInd's menu for a brief period—say, because you're testing a variety of configurations but you don't want them all to clutter the menu at once. You might also want to hide a boot loader if you want to override its default settings using a custom entry in refind.conf and you don't want an automatic search to duplicate that entry. You can easily hide a boot loader by removing or changing its .efi filename extension—for instance, changing grub.efi to grub.

Another way to hide a boot loader is to move it into rEFInd's own directory. In order to keep rEFInd from showing up in its own menu, it ignores boot loaders in its own directory. This obviously includes the rEFInd binary file itself, but also anything else you might store there.

In addition to hiding boot loaders, you can adjust their icons. You can do this in any of three ways for auto-detected boot loaders:

• You can place a boot loader in a directory with a name that matches one of rEFInd's standard icons, which take names of the form os_name.icns. To use this icon, you would place the boot loader in the directory called name.
• You can name an icon file after your boot loader, but with an extension of .icns. For instance, if you're using loader.efi, you would name the icon file loader.icns. (If you use the scan_all_linux_kernels option, you can give an icon for a Linux kernel without a .efi extension a name based on the kernel name but with a .icns extension—for instance, bzImage-3.3.2.icns will serve as the icon for the bzImage-3.3.2 kernel.) These icon files should be 128x128 images in Apple's ICNS format. You can create such files easily in OS X or convert PNG files to ICNS format with libicns.
• If you're booting OS X from its standard boot loader, or if you place a boot loader file in the root directory of a partition, you can create a file called .VolumeIcon.icns that holds an icon file. OS X uses this file for its volume icons, so rEFInd picks up these icons automatically, provided they include 128x128 bitmaps.

As a special case, rEFInd assigns icons to the Windows and OS X boot loaders based on their conventional locations, so they get suitable icons even though they don't follow these rules.

In addition to the main OS tag icon, you can set the badge icon for a volume by creating a file called .VolumeBadge.icns in the root directory of a partition. This icon file must include a 32x32 bitmap. If present, it replaces the disk-type icons that are overlaid on the main OS icon. If you use this feature, the badge is applied to all the boot loaders read from the disk, not just those stored in the root directory or the Apple boot loader location. You could use this feature to set a custom badge for different specific disks or to help differentiate multiple OS X installations on one computer.

Adjusting the Global Configuration

You can adjust many of rEFInd's options by editing its refind.conf file. You can use any text editor you like for the job, but be sure it saves the file in plain ASCII text, not in a word processing format. (In theory, a UTF-16 encoding should also work, but I've not tried that myself.) Note that the EFI shell includes its own editor. If you need to make a change before you launch an OS, you can launch a shell, change to the rEFInd directory, and type edit refind.conf to edit the file. This EFI editor is quite primitive, but it gets the job done. After editing, you'll need to reboot for rEFInd to read the changed configuration file.

Global configuration file options consist of a name token followed by one or more parameters, as in:

timeout 20

This example's name token is timeout and its parameter is 20. The net effect of this line is to set the timeout period to 20 seconds—rEFInd will wait 20 seconds before launching the default boot loader. Some options can take multiple parameters. These may be separated by commas, spaces, or tabs. The global options are summarized in the Table 1.

Prior to version 0.2.4, rEFInd supported a token called disable, whose function partially overlapped with hideui. Version 0.2.4 merges many of the features of these two tokens into hideui and creates the new showtools option, which provides the remaining functionality in a more flexible way.

As an example of rEFInd configuration, consider the following refind.conf file:

# Sample refind.conf file
timeout 5
banner custom.bmp
scan_driver_dirs drivers,EFI/tools/drivers
scanfor manual,external,optical
default_selection elilo

This example sets a timeout of 5 seconds; loads a custom graphic file called custom.bmp from the directory in which refind.efi resides; scans the drivers and EFI/tools/drivers directories for EFI drivers; uses manual boot loader configuration but also scans for external EFI boot loaders and EFI boot loaders on optical discs; and sets the default boot loader to the first loader found that includes the string elilo. Of course, since this file specifies use of manual boot loader configuration, it's not complete; you'll need to add at least one OS stanza to be able to boot from anything but an external disk or optical drive, as described shortly.

Creating OS Stanzas

OS stanzas in rEFInd are similar to those in GRUB Legacy, GRUB 2, or ELILO. You can use them to add configuration options to those that are auto-detected. You cannot modify the auto-detected options, though; if you just want to tweak one OS's configuration, you have several options, none of which is ideal:

• You can move or rename the boot loader file for the boot loader you want to tweak.
• You can disable all auto-detection options and add manual configurations for all your boot loaders, even those that work fine when auto-detected.
• You can put up with having duplicate tags in your OS list.

Each OS stanza begins with the keyword menuentry, a name for the entry, and an open curly brace ({). Subsequent lines constitute the bulk of the stanza, which concludes with a line containing nothing but a close curly brace (}). Table 2 summarizes the keywords that you can include in a stanza.

As an example, consider the following entries:

menuentry "Ubuntu Linux" {
    loader /EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi
    disabled
}

menuentry Gentoo {
    icon \EFI\refind\icons\os_gentoo.icns
    volume G_KERNELS
    loader \kernels\bzImage-3.3.0-rc7
    initrd \kernels\initrd-3.3.0-rc7.img
    options "root=/dev/sda3 ro"
}

menuentry "Windows via shell script" {
    icon \EFI\refind\icons\os_win.icns
    loader \EFI\tools\shell.efi
    options "fs0:\EFI\tools\launch_windows.nsh"
}

This example sets up three entries: one for Ubuntu Linux, one for Gentoo Linux, and one to launch a shell script. Note that the first two entries use different directory separators, simply to demonstrate the fact that it's possible. The Ubuntu entry sets no icon, since rEFInd will note that the boot loader is stored in the ubuntu directory, and it will automatically find the appropriate Ubuntu icon (os_ubuntu.icns). This option is, however, disabled, so no matching icon will appear when you reboot unless you first comment out or delete the disabled line.

Tip: Under Linux, you can learn a filesystem's label by using blkid, as in blkid /dev/sda1. The filesystem's label, if set, is identified by the keyword LABEL in the output.

The Gentoo entry begins with an icon specification to be sure that the icon is loaded from the same volume as rEFInd. (If the icon were stored on the same filesystem as the kernel, you'd place the icon line after the volume line.) This entry uses the volume token to tell rEFInd to load the kernel and initial RAM disk file from the filesystem called G_KERNELS. It passes the filename for an initial RAM disk using the initrd line and free-form options using the options line. Note that the kernel filename does not include a .efi extension, which keeps rEFInd from picking up the kernel file in its auto-scans.

The Windows via shell script entry may seem puzzling, but its purpose is to launch an OS (Windows in this case) after performing additional pre-boot initialization, which is handled by an EFI shell script. This works because you can pass the name of a shell script to an EFI shell—the script is named on the stanza's options line, using EFI file notation. The shell script, in turn, does whatever it needs to do and then launches the OS's boot loader:

mm 0003003E 8 -pci
fs0:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi

This example writes data to the computer's PCI bus via the EFI shell's mm command and then launches Windows. Chances are you won't need to engage in such operations, and I do not recommend you try this exact example unless you know what you're doing! This command was required to activate the video hardware on a computer of a person with whom I corresponded prior to booting Windows, but such needs are rare.

You can combine these OS stanzas with the global refind.conf options presented earlier. The result would contain just two entries on the rEFInd boot menu (for Gentoo and Windows, since the Ubuntu entry is disabled), unless rEFInd found other boot options on an external or optical disk.

Creating Submenu Entries

As described on the Using rEFInd page, rEFInd can present a menu of options for certain loader tags when you press the Insert, F2, or + key. rEFInd does this automatically when it detects Mac OS X or ELILO boot loaders, or when you set the OS type via the ostype option. The Mac OS X boot loader, in particular, accepts various options that you can use to boot in various ways.

Sometimes, you might want to create your own custom submenu entries, and rEFInd 0.2.1 and later enable you to do this. To create a custom submenu, you use the submenuentry keyword inside a menuentry stanza. Normally, you'll set the submenu definitions after you've set the main menu options, since the submenu options take the main menu options as defult, and so the main options must be set first. Like a menuentry stanza, a submenuentry definition begins with the keyword, the name of the item, and an open curly brace ({). It continues until a close curly brace (}). A submenu definition can use the keywords described in Table 3. Except as otherwise noted, using an option of a given name completely overrides the setting in the main stanza.

The following menu entry illustrates the use of submenu entries. This is a variant of the second entry presented earlier:

menuentry Gentoo {
    loader \EFI\linux\bzImage-3.3.0-rc7
    initrd \EFI\linux\initrd-3.3.0-rc7.img
    options "root=/dev/sda3 ro"
    icon \EFI\refind\icons\os_gentoo.icns
    submenuentry "single-user mode" {
        add_options "single"
    }
    submenuentry "3.3.0 final release kernel" {
        loader \EFI\linux\bzImage-3.3.0
        initrd \EFI\linux\initrd-3.3.0.img
    }
    submenuentry "boot via ELILO" {
        loader \EFI\elilo\elilo.efi
	initrd
	options
    }
}

The main menu item for this entry won't look different with the submenus defined than without them; but if you press the Insert key, you'll see the submenu items:

The main menu item appears at the top of the list—Run bzImage-3.3.0-rc7 in this example. The three submenus defined in this example's configuration file appear next, enabling you to launch in single-user mode, run the 3.3.0 release kernel, or boot via ELILO, respectively. Submenus also include an item called Return to Main Menu that does just as it says. (Alternatively, you can return to the main menu by pressing the Esc key.)

This example illustrates some of the things you can do with submenu entries:

• You can add kernel options when booting via the EFI stub loader—to launch single-user mode, to add graphical boot options, or what have you.
• You can change kernel options when booting via the EFI stub loader—to remove graphical boot options, to boot to a different root device, and so on.
• You can change your kernel and/or initial RAM disk when booting via the EFI stub loader.
• You can give users a choice of boot loaders. In this example, the main option boots via the kernel stub loader, but the submenu gives users the chance to boot via ELILO instead. In fact, you could even boot two entirely different OSes from manually-defined submenu entries, although that could be confusing.

copyright © 2012 by Roderick W. Smith

This document is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.3.

If you have problems with or comments about this Web page, please e-mail me at rodsmith@rodsbooks.com. Thanks.

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