REFInd
Boot manager for UEFI systems
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 the IA-32, x86-64, and AArch64 architectures.
01Features
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 Macs.
- Linux-specific features, including autodetecting EFI stub loader to boot Linux kernel directly and using fstab in lieu of rEFInd configuration file for boot order.
- Support for Secure Boot.
02Adoption
rEFInd is the default UEFI boot manager for TrueOS.
rEFInd is included in official repositories of major Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, and Gentoo.
03Development
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 of a personal computer (PC) without UEFI.
rEFInd can be built with either GNU-EFI or TianoCore EDK2/UDK.
04Fork
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “REFInd”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- REFInd 0.14.2 screenshot.webp by Software and Theme: Roderick W. Smith Screenshot: VulcanSphere, GPLv3
Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.
