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<h1>The rEFInd Boot Manager:<br />rEFInd Features</h1>
-
<p class="subhead">by Roderick W. Smith, <a
+<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: 3/23/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.2.2</p>
-
+<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
+11/6/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.7</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>
<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
EFI shell, disk partitioner, and other optional external components. (See the <a href="installing.html">Installing rEFInd</a> section for information on how to obtain and install these components.)</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>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; and the rEFInd versions don't work on at least some Macs.)</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>
<ul>
+<li>Bug fixes, focusing on those that have bothered me personally, such as those I've just mentioned.</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 directories to <i>not</i> be scanned for boot loaders, even if they would ordinarily be scanned (as of version 0.4.2).</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>The ability to set the screen's resolution, within limits imposed by the EFI (as of rEFInd 0.3.0).</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>The ability to auto-detect Linux initial RAM disk files and to read Linux kernel options from a <tt>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 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>Fixes to display problems on many UEFI-based PCs.</li>
<li>Improved detection of itself, to keep rEFInd out of its own boot menu.</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 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.)</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. Also, rEFInd doesn't support loading EFI drivers; that job should be done in other ways when using rEFInd.</p>
+<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>
<p>If these features sound useful, then read on and try rEFInd. If not, you may need to look elsewhere. My <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html">Managing EFI Boot Loaders for Linux</a> page may be useful to you in this case.</p>