The rEFInd Boot Manager:
rEFInd Features

by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com

Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 12/11/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.5.1

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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.

rEFInd is a fork of the rEFIt boot manager. As such, it has many features in common with rEFIt. These include the following:

• Support for both text-mode and graphical operation.
• Auto-detection of EFI and BIOS boot loaders.
• User-configurable graphics and icons—you can set your own background, set new icons, and so on.
• Launch EFI boot loaders.
• Launch legacy (BIOS) boot loaders on Macs. (rEFInd also supports legacy boots on some UEFI PCs; see below.)
• Launch options for an external EFI shell or disk partitioner. (See the Installing rEFInd section for information on how to obtain and install these components.)
• Set OS-specific boot options, such as to launch Mac OS X with verbose text-mode debug messages.
• 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.)
• Inclusion of drivers for the Linux ReiserFS and ext2 filesystems in the main package. (These drivers are absent from rEFInd prior to version 0.4.0; and the rEFInd versions don't work on at least some Macs.)

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:

• Bug fixes, focusing on those that have bothered me personally, such as those I've just mentioned.
• User-configurable methods of detecting boot loaders:
  • Auto-detection of EFI boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.
  • Auto-detection of legacy BIOS boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.
  • Manually via the configuration file
  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.
• Support for launching legacy BIOS boot loaders on UEFI PCs with suitable CSM support (as of version 0.4.6). This feature requires building rEFInd with the TianoCore EDK2 toolkit, which I do for my main binary build. Note that some UEFI PCs, such as those with Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI, lack a usable CSM.
• The ability to fine-tune options passed to EFI boot loaders, via manual configuration.
• An option editor to enable you to edit the options passed to an EFI boot loader on a per-boot basis.
• The ability to specify additional directories to scan for boot loaders and drivers (as of version 0.2.7).
• The ability to specify directories to not be scanned for boot loaders, even if they would ordinarily be scanned (as of version 0.4.2).
• 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).
• 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).
• The ability to specify an additional icon storage directory, to assist in efforts to customize rEFInd's appearance (as of version 0.3.4).
• The ability to set the screen's resolution, within limits imposed by the EFI (as of rEFInd 0.3.0).
• 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.)
• 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.
• The ability to auto-detect Linux initial RAM disk files and to read Linux kernel options from a refind_linux.conf file. These features support (nearly) automatic handling of Linux kernels with embedded EFI stub loader support (a new feature with Linux 3.3.0).
• Fixes to display problems on many UEFI-based PCs.
• Workarounds to file detection bugs in at least one type of UEFI firmware.
• Improved detection of itself, to keep rEFInd out of its own boot menu.
• 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.)
• Drivers for ISO-9660 and HFS+, 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.)
• Beginning with version 0.5.0, the ability to "talk" to the shim boot loader to validate binaries supported by shim or its machine owner key (MOK) list when booting in EFI mode. As of version 0.5.0, this support is still crude and buggy; it should be considered an alpha-level feature at the moment.

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.

If these features sound useful, then read on and try rEFInd. If not, you may need to look elsewhere. My Managing EFI Boot Loaders for Linux page may be useful to you in this case.

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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