The rEFInd Boot Manager:
Configuring the Boot Manager

by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com

Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 12/12/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.10.1

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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.

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.

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. (rEFInd 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.

You can also use the dont_scan_volumes, dont_scan_dirs, and dont_scan_files tokens in refind.conf to hide entire volumes, directories, and individual files, respectively. Note that dont_scan_volumes works with both EFI and legacy scans, whereas the other two options make sense for hiding only EFI-mode boot loaders.

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

• You can name an icon file after your boot loader, but with an extension of .icns or .png for ICNS-format and PNG-format icons, respectively. 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 or .png extension—for instance, bzImage-3.13.6.png will serve as the icon for the bzImage-3.13.6 kernel.) These icon files should be in Apple's ICNS or Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format, depending on the filename extension.
• If you're booting OS X from its standard boot loader, or if you place a boot loader file for any OS in the root directory of a partition, you can create a file called .VolumeIcon.icns or .VolumeIcon.png that holds an icon file. OS X uses the .VolumeIcon.icns file for its volume icons, so rEFInd picks up these icons automatically, provided they include appropriate bitmaps.
• 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 or os_name.png. To use such an icon, you would place the boot loader in the directory called name.
• You can give the filesystem from which the boot loader is loaded a name that matches the OS name component of the icon filename. For instance, if you call your boot filesystem CentOS, it matches the os_centos.icns icon. This match is performed on a word-by-word basis within the name, with "words" being delimited by spaces, dashes (-), and underscores (_). Thus, a volume called Debian-boot will match os_debian.icns or os_boot.icns.
• You can give the GPT partition from which the boot loader is loaded a name that matches the OS name component of the icon filename. This works much like the previous method, except that you'd use a tool like gdisk or parted to set the partition's name, rather than tune2fs or GParted to set the filesystem's name.
• rEFInd attempts to guess the Linux distribution based on data in the /etc/os-release file. This file will only be accessible if a separate /boot partition is not used, though. Manually adjusting the os-release file to change an OS icon in rEFInd is not recommended.
• Certain boot loaders have hard-coded icons associated with them. For instance, filenames beginning with vmlinuz or bzImage acquire Linux "Tux" icon and the bootmgfw.efi loader acquires a Windows icon. Fedora and Red Hat kernels can be identified by the presence of .fc or .el strings in their filenames, and so acquire suitable icons automatically. For the most part, these are the associations you want to overcome with the preceding rules, but sometimes renaming a boot loader to a more conventional name is the better approach. Renaming a locally-compiled kernel so that it acquires a Fedora or Red Hat icon is reasonable, but I don't recommend renaming precompiled kernels unless you also manually copy them to the ESP.

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 if 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 or .VolumeBadge.png in the root directory of a partition. 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. If you don't want any badges, you can add the badges option to hideui in refind.conf. Alternatively, or to hide just certain types of badges, you can replace the four badge icons in the rEFInd icons subdirectory (vol_external.png, vol_internal.png, vol_optical.png, and vol_net.png) with a completely transparent badge. The transparent.png file in the rEFInd icons directory may be used for this purpose.

The default icon sizes are 128x128 pixels for OS icons, 48x48 pixels for the second-row tools, and 32x32 pixels for badges. You can change the sizes of the big OS icons and the small tool icons with the big_icon_size and small_icon_size tokens in refind.conf, as noted in Table 1. The size of the disk-type badges is 1/4 the size of OS icons.

You can tell rEFInd to use any configuration filename by passing -c filename as an option, as in refind_x64.efi -c myrefind.conf to use myrefind.conf in rEFInd's main directory. You can specify a configuration file in another directory, but to do so, you must use backslashes as directory separators, as in -c \EFI\other\refind.conf. This feature is intended for users who want to have rEFInd appear in its own menu, with the version launched in this way behaving differently from the original—for instance, to have a secondary rEFInd that provides boot options hidden by the main one. In this scenario, the default refind.conf would have a manual boot stanza defining the new rEFInd instance, including its -c option.

You can adjust many of rEFInd's options by editing its configuration file, which is called refind.conf. You must first find this file, though. It is located in the rEFInd directory. On a UEFI-based PC, this directory will be located on the EFI System Partition (ESP), which can be in any number of places:

• Under Linux, the ESP is usually mounted at /boot/efi, although some users, particularly in Arch and Gentoo, prefer to mount the ESP at /boot.
• Under OS X, the ESP is not mounted by default, so you must mount it yourself to access it. Since 0.9.3, rEFInd has provided a script called mountesp, which locates and mounts the ESP. Open a Terminal and type sudo mountesp to mount the ESP. The program should tell you where it's mounted the ESP. It will remain mounted until you manually unmount it or until you reboot.
• Under Windows, the ESP is not mounted by default. You can do so manually by opening an Administrator Command Prompt window and typing mountvol S: /S to mount it at S:. (You can change the drive letter if you like.) Note that you will be able to access the ESP only from this Administrator Command Prompt window.

As a further twist, on Macs rEFInd can exist on its own partition or on the main OS X partition, depending on the version of rEFInd you've installed and the options you passed to the installation script. rEFInd has installed to the ESP by default since version 0.8.4. rEFInd typically lives on the ESP in the EFI/refind directory, or sometimes in EFI/BOOT or elsewhere. Thus, the rEFInd configuration file might be /boot/efi/EFI/refind/refind.conf, /boot/EFI/BOOT/refind.conf, /Volumes/ESP/EFI/refind/refind.conf, S:\EFI\refind\refind.conf, or something else, depending on your OS and mount point.

You can use any text editor you like to edit refind.conf, 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 this has been poorly tested.) 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 or re-launch rEFInd 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.

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 the rEFInd binary 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.

Note: Don't create manual boot stanzas unless you need to do so! Many people try to create them when rEFInd's auto-detection mechanisms will do the job just as well and with less hassle and chance of error. (Note that you can pass kernel options to a Linux kernel in the /boot/refind_linux.conf file; see the Methods of Booting Linux page for details.) Efforts to create manual boot stanzas when auto-detection can do the job just create pointless work for yourself!

Manual boot stanzas in rEFInd are similar to those in GRUB Legacy, GRUB 2, or ELILO. You can use them to add EFI boot loaders to those that are auto-detected. rEFInd does not yet support manual boot stanzas for BIOS-mode boot loaders. You also cannot modify the auto-detected options; if you just want to tweak one OS's configuration, you have several options:

• You can use the dont_scan_volumes, dont_scan_dirs, or dont_scan_files options in refind.conf to hide the tag you want to modify, then create a manual boot stanza to replace it.
• 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" {
    loader /EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi
    disabled
}

menuentry Arch {
    icon /EFI/refind/icons/os_arch.png
    volume ARCHBOOT
    loader /vmlinuz-linux
    initrd /initramfs-linux.img
    options "root=/dev/sda3 ro"
}

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

This example sets up three entries: one for Ubuntu, one for Arch Linux, and one to launch a shell script. Note that the final entry uses different directory separators from the first two, simply to demonstrate the fact that it's possible. (The form of directory separators in options lines is important, though, because the program being launched may expect a particular directory separator character.) 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.png). This entire entry 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. Some versions also return the partition's label and partition GUID (referred to as PARTUUID by blkid). You can obtain the partition's name and unique GUID using sgdisk, as in sgdisk -i 1 /dev/sda to find the data on /dev/sda1.

The Arch 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 or partition called ARCHBOOT. It passes the filename for an initial RAM disk using the initrd line and free-form options using the options line.

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 prior to booting Windows on a computer of a person with whom I corresponded, but such needs are rare. (Using the spoof_osx_version option in rEFInd 0.9.3 and later may also help with some such problems, at least on Macs.) Another example of a similar approach can be found in this forum thread. A few pointers on finding addresses for your hardware can be found in this post.

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 Arch and Windows, since the Ubuntu entry is disabled), unless rEFInd found other boot options on an external or optical disk.

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, when you set the OS type via the ostype option, or when booting a Linux kernel directly. 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 enables 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 Arch {
    icon /EFI/refind/icons/os_arch.png
    loader /vmlinuz-linux
    initrd /initramfs-linux.img
    options "root=/dev/sda3 ro"
    submenuentry "single-user mode" {
        add_options "single"
    }
    submenuentry "Use fallback initrd" {
        initrd /initramfs-linux-fallback.img
    }
    submenuentry "boot via SYSLINUX" {
        loader \EFI\syslinux\syslinux.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 F2 or Insert key, you'll see the submenu items:

The main menu item appears at the top of the list—Boot using default options. The three submenus defined in this example's configuration file appear next, enabling you to launch in single-user mode, boot the standard kernel with the fallback initrd file, or boot via SYSLINUX, 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 remove options. Note the empty initrd and options lines in the SYSLINUX entry, for example; these empty lines override the default entries, which are carried over to submenu entries by default.
• 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 SYSLINUX instead. In fact, you could even boot two entirely different OSes from manually-defined submenu entries, although that could be confusing.

Just before launching an OS, rEFInd stores the description in the EFI variable PreviousBoot with a GUID of 36d08fa7-cf0b-42f5-8f14-68df73ed3740. The next time rEFInd launches, it reads that same variable and sets the default boot loader to that value, if it's still available and if the first item in default_selection in the refind.conf file is a plus sign (+).

Under Linux, the variable that rEFInd uses to store this information is accessible as /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/PreviousBoot-36d08fa7-cf0b-42f5-8f14-68df73ed3740. Thus, you can back up this value, modify it, and write it back out to adjust your next-booted OS. Getting this string just right can be a bit tricky, though, and if the kernel doesn't like its format, it will not let you modify the variable. If you try to modify the variable, be aware that it's stored in UTF-16 format. As with the default_selection token in refind.conf, you can enter any substring that uniquely identifies the entry you want to boot.

In principle, you should be able to use a similar procedure to force rEFInd to boot another OS by default in any other OS that supports writing EFI runtime variables. Unfortunately, I don't know the mechanisms used for this task in Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, or any other OS.

If you want to consistently boot a particular OS by default and ignore the previous boot, you can use default_selection, but omit the + at the start of the line.

copyright © 2012–2015 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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