rEFInd is a boot manager for UEFI and EFI-based machines. It can be used to boot multiple operating systems that are installed on a single non-volatile device. It also provides a way to launch UEFI applications. It was forked from discontinued rEFIt in 2012, with 0.2.0 as its first release. rEFind supports x86, x86-64, and AArch64 architecture.

Features

rEFInd has several features: * Automatic operating systems detection. * Customisable OS launch options. * Graphical or text mode. Theme is customisable. * Mac-specific features, including spoofing booting process to enable secondary video chipsets on some Mac. * Linux-specific features, including autodetecting EFI stub loader to boot

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

directly and using fstab in lieu of rEFInd configuration file for boot order. * Support for Secure Boot.

Adoption

rEFInd is the default Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot manager for TrueOS. rEFInd is included in official repositories of major Linux distributions.

Development

GNU-EFI and TianoCore are supported as main development platforms for writing binary UEFI applications in C to launch right from the rEFInd GUI menu. Typical purposes of an EFI application are fixing boot problems and programmatically modifying settings within UEFI environment, which would otherwise be performed from within the

BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the ...

of a personal computer (PC) without UEFI. rEFInd can be built with either GNU-EFI or TianoCore EDK2/UDK.

Fork

RefindPlus is a fork of rEFInd that add several features and improvements for Mac devices, specifically MacPro3,1 and MacPro5,1, and equivalent Xserve.

References

External links