4 - Added new "scan_delay" feature to impose a delay before scanning
7 - Changed default "scanfor" option from internal-external-optical to either
8 internal-external-optical-manual (for non-Macs) or
9 internal-hdbios-external-biosexternal-optical-cd-manual (for Macs). I've
10 done this for two reasons:
11 - Many Mac users have been confused by the fact that rEFInd needs
12 reconfiguration to detect Windows (or Linux installed in BIOS mode),
13 since rEFIt scans BIOS devices by default. Adding the BIOS options as
14 default for them should help them.
15 - Adding the "manual" option enables users to simply add manual boot
16 stanzas and have them work, which is more intuitive. Adding the
17 "manual" option will have no effect unless manual stanzas are created
18 or uncommented, so this part of the change won't affect users' working
19 default configurations.
21 - Added new legacy (BIOS) boot support for UEFI-based PCs.
26 - Fixed bug that caused a failure to boot BIOS-based OSes on Macs.
28 - Fixed bug in install.sh that caused it to fail to detect rEFItBlesser.
33 - Fixed bug that caused filesystem labels to be corrupted by rEFInd on
36 - Fixed bug that caused filesystem labels to be truncated in the drivers
39 - Fixed bug in use_graphics_for option parsing that caused most options
40 to set graphics mode for OS X and/or Linux but not other boot
43 - Tweaked install script to better isolate the ESP under OS X.
48 - rEFInd now supports compilation using the TianoCore UDK2010/EDK2
49 development kit in addition to GNU-EFI.
51 - Added new "use_graphics_for" option to control which OSes to boot in
52 graphics mode. (This effect lasts for a fraction of a second on most
53 systems, since the boot loader that rEFInd launches is likely to set
54 graphics or text mode itself.)
56 - Graphics-mode booting now clears the screen to the current rEFInd
57 background color (rather than black) and does NOT display boot messages.
58 The intent is for a smoother transition when booting OS X, or perhaps
59 other OSes that don't display boot loader messages. In practice, this
60 effect will be tiny for many OSes, since the boot loader generally clears
61 the screen within a fraction of a second of being launched; but the
62 "flicker" of a rEFInd message in that time can sometimes be distracting.
64 - Filesystem drivers now work on EFI 1.x systems, such as Macs.
66 - Removed "linux.conf" as a valid alternative name for "refind_linux.conf"
67 for holding Linux kernel options. The kernel developers plan to use
68 "linux.conf" themselves.
73 - Added a message to install.sh when run on Macs to remind users to update
74 the "scanfor" line in refind.conf if they need to boot BIOS-based OSes
77 - Modified install.sh script to be smarter about running efibootmgr on
78 Linux. It now uses the whole path to the rEFInd binary as a key to
79 determine whether an existing entry exists, rather than just the filename
80 portion. If an entry exists and is the first entry in the boot order, the
81 script does nothing to the NVRAM entries. If such an entry exists but is
82 not the default, the script deletes that entry and creates a new one
83 (implicitly making it the first in the boot order). If such an entry does
84 not exist, the script creates a new one (again, making it the first in
87 - Added "dont_scan_dirs" configuration file option, which adds directories
88 to a "blacklist" of directories that are NOT scanned for boot loaders.
93 - Added "scanning for new boot loaders" message to the re-scan function
94 (hitting Esc at the main menu). It usually flashes up too quickly to
95 be of importance, but if the scan function takes a while because of
96 access to a CD that must be spun up, it should make it clear that the
99 - Modified install.sh script to detect rEFItBlesser on Macs, and if
100 present, to ask the user if it should be removed.
102 - Cleaned up the Make.common file for the filesystem drivers.
104 - Changed HFS+ driver to return volume label of "HFS+ volume" rather than
105 an empty label. (The driver doesn't currently read the real volume
108 - Fixed bug that could cause rEFInd to appear in its own menu after
109 running a shell and then re-scanning for boot loaders.
114 - Inclusion of drivers for ISO-9660, HFS+, ReiserFS, and ext2fs. Most of
115 these drivers originated with rEFIt, although the HFS+ driver seems to
116 have come from Oracle's VirtualBox, with some files from Apple. I hadn't
117 included these drivers previously because the build process proved
118 challenging. As it is, they don't work on my Mac Mini, I suspect because
119 the build process with the UDK2010 development kit may not work with the
120 EFI 1.x that Apple uses.
122 - Addition of support for drivers in the "drivers_{arch}" subdirectory of
123 the main rEFInd binary directory (e.g., "drivers_x64" or "drivers_ia32").
124 Drivers may continue to be placed in the "drivers" subdirectory.
126 - Added new feature to eject CDs (and other removable media): Press F12 to
127 eject all such media. This function works only on some Macs, though (it
128 relies on an Apple-specific EFI extension, and this extension isn't even
129 implemented on all Macs, much less on UEFI-based PCs).
131 - Fixed a problem that could cause GRUB 2 to fail to read its configuration
132 file when launched from rEFInd.
137 - Removed the GRUB 2 detection "reciped" added with 0.3.2, since I've
138 received reports that it's not working as intended.
140 - Added re-scan feature: Press the Esc key to have rEFInd re-read its
141 configuration file, tell the EFI to scan for new filesystems, and re-scan
142 those filesystems for boot loaders. The main purpose is to enable
143 scanning a new removable medium that you insert after launching rEFInd;
144 however, it can also be used to immediately implement changes to the
145 configuration file or new drivers you load from an EFI shell.
147 - Fixed a bug that could cause the scroll-right arrow to be replaced by the
148 scroll-left arrow under some circumstances.
153 - Added new configuration file option: "icons_dir", which sets the name
154 of the subdirectory in which icons are found. See the documentation or
155 sample configuration file for a full description.
157 - Modified Makefile to generate rEFInd binary that includes architecture
158 code -- refind_ia32.efi or refind_x64.efi, rather than the generic
159 refind.efi. This is done mainly to help the install.sh script. The
160 program can be named anything you like on the disk. (The generic name
161 refind.efi is used on unknown architectures.)
163 - Improved install.sh script: Fixed bug on OS X 10.7 and enable it to be
164 used after building from source code (or via new "make install" Makefile
167 - Improved screen redraws to produce less flicker when moving among the
168 second-row tags or to the last tag on the first row.
173 - Improved menu navigation:
174 - In graphics mode, left & right arrow keys move left & right, while up &
175 down arrows move between rows.
176 - Page Up and Page Down now move through chunks of visible tags (in both
177 text & graphics modes), jumping from one row to another only when at
178 the edge of the row. In text mode, the "rows" are broken down as in
179 graphics mode, but they aren't visibly distinguished on the screen.
181 - Improved text-mode use: rEFInd now displays the proper number of entries
182 when first started in text mode and scrolling is done sensibly when too
183 many entries exist to fit on the screen.
188 - Added the install.sh script to install rEFInd on Linux and Mac OS X
189 systems. This script must be run as root (or via sudo). It requires
190 no options, but on Mac OS X, passing it the "esp" option causes it
191 to install rEFInd on the computer's ESP rather than the default of the
192 currently OS X boot partition. (Under Linux, the default is to install to
193 the ESP.) Note that there may be some unusual cases in which this script
196 - Does a better job of clearing the screen when launching OSes in text
199 - Added detection "recipe" for GRUB 2's BIOS Boot Partition.
201 - Fixed bogus detection of ESPs created by Linux's mkdosfs utility or
202 Windows as bootable partitions when "scanfor" includes BIOS scanning
209 - Fixed bug that caused spurious "Unsupported while scanning the root
210 directory" messages under some conitions on Macs.
212 - Modified loader scanning code to sort boot loader entries within a
213 directory by modification time, so that the most recently-modified loader
214 is first among those in a given directory. Thus, if you specify a
215 directory name (or volume name, for loaders stored in the root directory
216 of a volume) as the default_selection, the most recent of those loaders
217 will be the default. This is intended to help with Linux kernel
218 maintenance when using the EFI stub loader; set up this way, the most
219 recent kernel copied to your kernel directory will be the default,
220 obviating the need to adjust the refind.conf file when adding a new
221 kernel. If you want to change the default among those in the default
222 directory, you can use "touch" to adjust the modification timestamp.
224 - Tweaked code to find loader-specific .icns file so that it finds files
225 for Linux kernels without .efi extensions. In this case, files should be
226 named the same as the kernels they match, but with .icns extensions. For
227 instance, bzImage-3.3.2 should have an icon called bzImage-3.3.2.icns.
228 (The old code would have looked for an icon called bzImage-3.3.icns.)
230 - Eliminated bogus OS loader tags for filenames that end in ".icns" when
231 the scan_all_linux_kernels option is set.
236 - I'm officially upgrading this project's status from "alpha" to "beta" and
237 giving it a bump from 0.2.x to 0.3.0. This doesn't reflect any major
238 milestone with this version; rather, it reflects my sense that rEFInd has
239 been "out there" for a while, and although I've gotten bug reports,
240 they've been minor and/or have been fixed. The program still has known
241 bugs, but my impression is that it is, overall, usable by ordinary users.
243 - Added "resolution" option to refind.conf, which enables setting the video
244 resolution. To use it, pass two numeric values, as in "resolution 1024
245 768" to use a 1024x768 video mode. Note that not all modes are supported.
246 If you specify a non-supported video mode on a UEFI system, a message
247 appears listing the supported video modes and you must then press a key
248 to continue, using the default video mode (usually 800x600).
249 Unfortunately, I don't know the calls to get a list of supported video
250 modes on older EFI 1.x systems (including Macs), so on Macs setting an
251 incorrect video mode silently fails (you keep using the default mode).
252 This makes changing your video mode a hit-or-miss proposition on Macs.
253 CAUTION: It's possible to set a legal video mode that your monitor can't
254 handle, in which case you'll get a blank display until you boot an OS
255 that resets the video mode.
257 - Fixed (maybe) a bug that caused rEFInd to crash when returning from an
258 EFI shell or other programs on Macs, particularly when rEFInd used
259 graphical mode. I'm not 100% sure this bug is squashed because I still
260 don't understand the cause and I only have one Mac for testing. See
261 comments in the ReinitRefitLib() function in refit/lib.c for more
264 - Added new refind.conf option: scan_all_linux_kernels, which causes Linux
265 kernels that lack ".efi" extensions to be included in scans for EFI boot
266 loaders. This may help integration with Linux distributions that don't
267 give their kernels such names by default. Beware, though: It can detect
268 unwanted files, such as older non-stub-loader kernels or .icns files used
269 to give kernels with .efi extensions custom icons.
271 - Improved EFI boot loader detection on boards with Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI,
272 and perhaps other EFIs with a buggy StriCmp() function. Files with both
273 ".efi" and ".EFI" extensions should now be detected as boot loaders.
275 - Fixed a bug that caused rEFInd to fail to scan for drivers if the
276 filesystem driver didn't set a volume name (that is, if the relevant
277 field was set to NULL rather than even an empty string). In such
278 situations, rEFInd now reports the volume name as "Unknown".
283 - After much trial and tribulation, I've overcome a GNU-EFI limitation and
284 enabled rEFInd to load EFI drivers. This feature was present in the
285 original build of rEFIt but was removed in the versions that could
286 compile under Linux, but now it's back -- and still being compiled under
287 Linux! To use it, you should place your drivers in a convenient directory
288 on the ESP (or whatever partition you use to launch rEFInd) and add a
289 "scan_driver_dirs" entry to refind.conf to tell rEFInd where to look. (As
290 always, you should specify the driver directory relative to the root of
291 the filesystem.) Note that you can't launch drivers from another
292 filesystem; they must be on the same volume that holds rEFInd. Those who
293 compile from source code should note that implementing this feature
294 necessitated using a more recent version of the GNU-EFI library. I'm
295 currently using version 3.0p, and version 3.0i does NOT work. I don't
296 know where the change occurred, but you may need to upgrade your GNU-EFI
299 - Fixed bug that caused rEFInd to show up in its own menu sometimes.
301 - Added new refind.conf token: also_scan_dirs. When scanning volumes for
302 EFI boot loaders, rEFInd always scans the root directory and every
303 subdirectory of the /EFI directory, but it doesn't recurse into these
304 directories. The also_scan_dirs token adds more directories to the scan
305 list. It defaults to "elilo,boot", but you can set it to any directory or
306 directories you like.
311 - Added "volume" keyword to configuration file's stanza options. This
312 option changes the volume from which subsequent files (specified by
313 "loader" and "icon") are loaded. You pass "volume" the name/label of the
314 FILESYSTEM you want to use (not the GPT partition name), or a number
315 followed by a colon (e.g., "1:"). The former should reliably identify a
316 filesystem, assuming the name is unique. The latter assigns numbers based
317 on the order in which they're scanned, which may not be as reliable but
318 should work when a volume is unnamed.
320 - Fixed bug in 0.2.5 that caused failure of Linux initial RAM disk
321 mapping on some (but not all) systems. Affected computers include at
322 least some Intel motherboards, maybe others.
327 - Fixed bug that caused an inability to associate initial RAM disks with
328 Linux kernels stored in a volume's root directory.
330 - Volume badges (that override default badges) are now stored in
331 .VolumeBadge.icns. Although undocumented, rEFInd formerly loaded custom
332 volume badges from .VolumeIcon.icns. This carryover from rEFIt was a
333 confusing name, given the next (new) feature, so I've changed and
334 documented the name....
336 - Added ability to set a default icon for a loader stored in the root
337 directory of a volume: The icon is stored in .VolumeIcon.icns. This icon
338 is also used for Mac OS X volumes booted from the standard location.
340 - Fixed bug that caused icons to drop back to generic icons when rEFInd
341 was launched in certain ways (such as from an EFI shell in rEFInd's
342 directory) on certain systems.
344 - Fixed bug that caused "unknown disable flag" to be shown (very briefly)
345 instead of "unknown hideui flag" when an improper hideui flag was set.
350 - Created new refind.conf entry: "showtools". This entry takes options of
351 "shell", "gptsync", "about", "exit", "reboot", and "shutdown". This
352 option is in some respects an affirmative version of portions of the old
353 "disable" and "hideui" options; however, it enables users to specify the
354 order in which these options appear on the screen. Also, the "exit"
355 option is new; it terminates the program. The effect is usually to return
356 to whatever tool launched it or to launch a default OS; however, this is
357 somewhat unpredictable. The default therefore omits the "exit" option, as
358 well as "gptsync", which has always been dangerous (but necessary on most
359 MacOS/Windows dual-boot setups on Macs). As part of this reconfiguration,
360 I've eliminated the "rescue Linux" option, which always seemed pointless
363 - Folded "disable" and "hideui" refind.conf entries into one ("disable"),
364 and reduced the number of options to six: "banner", "label",
365 "singleuser", "hwtest", "arrows", and "all". ("arrows" is new and
366 disables the scroll arrows when a system has too many tags to display
369 - Added max_tags option to the refind.conf file, enabling users to reduce
370 the maximum number of OS loader tags that can be displayed at once.
372 - Updated rEFIt icon, based on the 128x128 volume label from the rEFIt CD
375 - Added x86 and x86-64 EFI shells to the CD image version of the binary,
376 but NOT to the binary zip file. The logic is that the CD image is more
377 likely to be used directly as an emergency disc and so may need this
378 feature, even though the source isn't part of the rEFInd project. (The
379 source is readily available from the TianoCore project.)
381 - EFI shells may now be stored at /shellx64.efi for x86-64 systems or at
382 /shellia32.efi for x86 systems. The /EFI/tools/shell.efi name is also
383 recognized; however, if both files are present, two EFI shell icons will
384 appear on the main menu. The /efi/{refind-path/apps/shell.efi filename,
385 which was never officially documented but worked as a carryover from
386 rEFIt, is no longer valid.
391 - Fixed (maybe) a bug that caused hangs when launching a second program
392 after returning from a first. There are some weird system-to-system
393 differences, though, and this fix causes (apparently harmless) error
394 messages about "(re)opening our installation volume" on at least one
395 system (a 32-bit Mac Mini). I'm committing this change because, imperfect
396 though it is, it's preferable to the earlier version, at least on my
397 small sample of computers.
399 - Because of news that the Linux kernel developers are planning to use the
400 filename linux.conf to hold Linux kernel configuration data for EFI
401 booting, I'm transitioning rEFInd away from that name and to
402 refind_linux.conf to avoid a conflict. This version can use either name,
403 with refind_linux.conf taking precedence if both are present.
405 - Added logo for Arch Linux.
410 - Fixed bug that caused program failure when Linux kernels with EFI stub
411 support were detected with no associated version numbers. rEFInd now
412 permits automatic linking of *ONE* versionless kernel to *ONE*
413 versionless initrd file.
415 - Fixed bug that caused program hangs when a boot loader filename or label
416 was too long. Such names are now properly truncated and program execution
419 - Fixed bug that caused no text to appear in submenus on UEFI systems with
420 small screens (800x600). NOTE: Problem still occurs on screens smaller
421 than this, but such systems are very rare.
426 - Added ability to set a "default_selection" that's a title or a substring
427 of one -- the name given to a stanza in a "menuentry" or the boot
428 loader's filename, in most cases, although "Mac OS X", "Windows XP
429 (XoM)", and "Microsoft EFI boot" are also titles.
431 - Added support for semi-automatic scans of Linux kernels with EFI stub
432 loader support. The program auto-detects matching initial RAM disk files
433 and loads additional options from the "linux.conf" file in the same
434 directory as the kernel.
436 - Added support for "submenuentry" keyword and associated sub-stanza
437 entries in refind.conf file.
439 - Renamed icons/os_mint.icns to icons/os_linuxmint.icns to match the
440 filename Linux Mint ACTUALLY uses for its ESP boot loader directory.
446 - Initial public release