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<h1>The rEFInd Boot Manager:<br />rEFInd Features</h1>
href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
-11/10/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.7.5</p>
+3/4/2017, referencing rEFInd 0.10.5</p>
-<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>
+<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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<li>Bug fixes, focusing on those that have bothered me personally.</li>
+<li>The ability to specify a configuration file to use at program launch
+ time via the <tt>-c <tt class="variable">filename</tt></tt>
+ command-line option.</li>
+
<li>User-configurable methods of detecting boot loaders:
<ul>
- <li>Auto-detection of EFI boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.</li>
+ <li>Auto-detection of EFI boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, optical discs, and network boot loaders.</li>
<li>Auto-detection of legacy BIOS boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.</li>
<li>Manually via the configuration file</li>
</ul>
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>
+<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>
+
<li>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.</li>
+suitable CSM support (as of version 0.4.6, with significant improvements in
+version 0.8.0). Note that some UEFI PCs,
+such as those with Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI, lack a usable CSM.</li>
+
+<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>
+
+<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>
<li>The ability to fine-tune options passed to EFI boot loaders, via manual configuration.</li>
<li>Support for full-screen banner images.</li>
+<li>Support for scaling icons, to adjust icon size for users with high-resolution displays, poor eyesight, or simply for personal preference reasons.</li>
+
<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>
<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>
+<li>The ability to handle <i>some</i> (but not all) touch-screen displays, as used on tablet computers.</li>
+
<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>
<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>
<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>
+<li>The ability to "fold" multiple Linux kernels into a single entry in the main menu. Additional kernels appear as options in the submenu. This feature is enabled by default, but can be disabled by setting <tt>fold_linux_kernels false</tt> in <tt>refind.conf</tt>.</li>
+
<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>
+<li>As of rEFInd 0.9.0, if a Linux root (<tt>/</tt>) filesystem is identified by the type code specified by the <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/DiscoverablePartitionsSpec/">Discoverable Partitions Specification (DPS)</a> and the root filesystem cannot be identified via <tt>refind_linux.conf</tt> or <tt>/etc/fstab</tt>, rEFInd passes a kernel <tt>root=</tt> identifier based on the identified DPS root (<tt>/</tt>) type code.</li>
+
<li>Fixes to display problems on many UEFI-based PCs.</li>
<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>
<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>
-<li>Drivers for ISO-9660, 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 driver is derived from the rEFIt and GRUB 2.0 driver code.)</li>
+<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>
-<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>
+<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>
<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—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>
+<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>
+
+<li>Beginning with version 0.10.0, the ability to spoof the booting of OS X when booting non-Apple OSes. This changes the way a Mac's EFI initializes hardware, which can get secondary video chipsets working on some Macs. This feature is controlled via the <tt>spoof_osx_version</tt> token in <tt>refind.conf</tt>.</li>
+
+<li>Beginning with version 0.10.0, the ability to adjust Apple System Integrity Protection (SIP; aka "rootless" or "CSR") settings. These settings control what features are off-limits even to <tt>root</tt> in OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) and later. To use this feature, you must set specific CSR values on <tt>refind.conf</tt>'s <tt>csr_values</tt> line <i>and</i> add <tt>csr_rotate</tt> to the <tt>showtools</tt> line.</li>
+
+<li>Beginning with version 0.10.1, support for ARM64 (aka AARCH64 or AA64) CPUs. Such systems that boot using UEFI are quite rare, at least in December of 2015.</li>
+
</ul>
<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>
<hr />
-<p>copyright © 2012–2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
+<p>copyright © 2012–2017 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
<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>