<p class="subhead">by Roderick W. Smith, <a
href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
-<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 4/19/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.2.7</p>
+<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
+6/18/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.12</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>
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+</table>
<hr />
<li>User-configurable graphics and icons—you can set your own background, set new icons, and so on.</li>
-<li>Launch EFI boot loaders or, on Macs, launch BIOS-based boot loaders. (I have yet to get the BIOS-launching feature to work on a UEFI-based PC, but it might work on a model I don't own.)</li>
+<li>Launch EFI boot loaders.</li>
+
+<li>Launch legacy (BIOS) boot loaders on Macs. (rEFInd also supports legacy boots on some UEFI PCs; see below.)</li>
<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>
+<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>
+
<li>Set OS-specific boot options, such as to launch Mac OS X with verbose text-mode debug messages.</li>
<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>
+<li>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. See below concerning an ext4fs driver.)</li>
+
</ul>
-<p>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:</p>
+<p>rEFInd expands on rEFIt by providing features that improve on or go beyond those of rEFIt, such as:</p>
<ul>
-<li>Bug fixes, focusing on those that have bothered me personally, such as those I've just mentioned.</li>
+<li>Bug fixes, focusing on those that have bothered me personally.</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 BIOS boot loaders, independently on internal hard disks, external hard disks, and optical discs.</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>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>
+
<li>The ability to fine-tune options passed to EFI boot loaders, via manual configuration.</li>
+<li>An option editor to enable you to edit the options passed to an EFI boot loader on a per-boot basis.</li>
+
<li>The ability to specify additional directories to scan for boot loaders and drivers (as of version 0.2.7).</li>
+<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>
+
+<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>
+
+<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>
+
+<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>
+
+<li>Support for icons, selection backgrounds, and banner graphics in PNG format, in addition to the ICNS and BMP formats supported by rEFIt.</li>
+
+<li>Support for full-screen banner images.</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>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.</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>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>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>Workarounds to file detection bugs in at least one type of UEFI firmware.</li>
<li>Improved detection of itself, to keep rEFInd out of its own boot menu.</li>
+<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>
+
<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+, and ext4fs, 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.)</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>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>
+
</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 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
+<p>copyright © 2012–2013 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>