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1 0.10.1 (12/12/2015):
2 --------------------
3
4 - Change to PPA version: Installing the PPA now queries the user about
5 whether to install to the ESP. Upgrades will remember the initial
6 selection.
7
8 - Modified time-based sorting of loaders in a single directory to push
9 anything starting with "vmlinuz-0-rescue" to the end of the list. Fedora
10 gives its rescue kernels filenames that begin with that string, and if
11 such a kernel happens to be the most recent, treating it normally will
12 cause it to become the default when kernel folding is in use. This is
13 almost certainly undesirable, so this change keeps the rescue kernel at
14 the end of the list instead, which is saner.
15
16 - Significantly reworked the project's Makefiles. This should have no
17 impact on ordinary users, and even most developers should barely notice
18 it; but it should make future extensions to additional platforms or
19 building in different environments easier.
20
21 - Added workaround to gptsync for issue with some Macs' EFIs that caused
22 the program to skip through all prompts, thus accepting the default
23 option. This would normally cause gptsync to do nothing.
24
25 - Added type code 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC (Apple Core Storage,
26 gdisk type AF05) to list of partition types recognized by gptsync.
27
28 - Removed Luxi Sans Mono font, since I discovered it was not open source;
29 and changed the default font from Nimbus Mono to Liberation Mono.
30
31 - Added support for compiling rEFInd for ARM64 (aka AARCH64 or aa64). This
32 works with both GNU-EFI and Tianocore UDK2014.SP1.P1. This support is
33 currently poorly tested. In particular, I used QEMU on an x86-64 computer
34 to create a virtualized ARM64 environment; I've not yet tested on a real
35 computer. I couldn't get QEMU to create a video card, so I used a serial
36 terminal, which means that the graphics features are untested -- I ran
37 rEFInd with "textonly" uncommented in refind.conf. I've tested the ext4fs
38 driver but no other drivers, although they all compile. (So does gptsync,
39 although it's unlikely to be useful on ARM64.) Some rEFInd features are
40 meaningless on ARM64, such as BIOS-mode boot support, anything geared
41 toward Macs (csr_values/csr_rotate, spoof_osx_version, etc.), and
42 enable_and_lock_vmx.
43
44 - Fixed bug that caused rEFInd to fail to scan EFI boot loaders on
45 removable media when rEFInd itself was launched from the fallback
46 filename.
47
48 - Moved detailed descriptions of refind-install from installing.html to
49 a refind-install man page. To keep this information Web-accessible, I've
50 also created HTML versions of the three man pages and linked them into
51 the HTML documentation.
52
53 - Updated LodePNG to latest version (20151024).
54
55 - Fixed bugs in mkrlconf and in refind-install that could cause some kernel
56 options to be excluded from refind_linux.conf. There were two trouble
57 conditions:
58 - Previously, these scripts assumed that the first option in
59 /proc/cmdline was the kernel's filename, but this isn't always the
60 case. (In particular, when gummiboot launches the kernel, this is not
61 true. It might be an incorrect assumption in some other cases, too.)
62 The fix involves checking for likely signs of a kernel filename before
63 discarding this first option.
64 - These scripts cut the "initrd=*" option from /proc/cmdline, but the
65 call to "sed" was overzealous and cut until the end of input. This
66 usually worked, since the initrd= option was usually last on the line;
67 but if it wasn't, any options following initrd= would be lost.
68
69 - Added "kernel*" as a matching pattern for Linux kernels, since this is
70 what Gentoo uses by default.
71
72 - The refind-install script can now be run as a symbolic link in Linux.
73 This enables creating a /usr/sbin/refind-install link in Linux packages,
74 with the binaries stashed wherever the package system likes them. This
75 feature does NOT work in OS X, but there's relatively little need for it
76 there.
77
78 0.10.0 (11/8/2015):
79 -------------------
80
81 - Fixed bug that caused refind-install to not unmount the ESP when it
82 should under OS X.
83
84 - Modified refind-install and mkrlconf scripts to use /proc/cmdline as
85 source for default boot options EXCEPT when refind-install receives the
86 --root option. In that case, refind-install continues to use
87 /etc/default/grub as the source of default options. The idea behind this
88 change is that it's more reliable to get boot options from /proc/cmdline
89 when the targeted system is the one that's booted; but --root would be
90 used from emergency disks or live CDs, in which case the current boot
91 options would be completely wrong, so extracting boot options from GRUB
92 files is the best bet for getting close to the right options.
93
94 - Added "@/boot" to default also_scan_dirs setting. This makes kernels
95 show up on Btrfs volumes under Ubuntu (and perhaps others), at least when
96 the Btrfs driver is loaded.
97
98 - Added new System Integrity Protection (SIP) rotation feature for Macs
99 running OS X 10.11 or later. This feature is disabled by default, except
100 on CD-R and USB flash drive images, on which it's enabled. To enable it,
101 you must make TWO changes to refind.conf: Uncomment the new "csr_values"
102 item and add "csr_rotate" to the "showtools" line (uncommenting it, too,
103 if it's commented out). If desired, you can set more values on
104 "csr_values"; these are comma-delimited one-byte hexadecimal values that
105 define various SIP states. When SIP/CSR rotation is activated, a new
106 shield icon appears among the tools. Selecting it causes the next defined
107 value to be set and a confirmation message to appear for three seconds.
108
109 - Added display of current System Integrity Protection (SIP) mode to
110 "About" display.
111
112 - Added mountesp script for OS X to (you guessed it!) mount the ESP.
113
114 - Renamed support scripts: install.sh to refind-install, mvrefind.sh to
115 mvrefind, and mkrlconf.sh to mkrlconf.
116
117 - New icons! The old ones were getting to be a jumbled mess of styles,
118 particularly for OS tags. I used the AwOken icon set
119 (http://alecive.deviantart.com/art/AwOken-163570862) for the core icons,
120 then expanded from there by creating my own icons and modifying icons for
121 Debian and Elementary OS. I'm also trying to keep better track of
122 copyrights and licenses on icons. Between that and some icons being for
123 OSes that probably see very little use (FreeDOS and eComstation, for
124 instance), a few OS icons have been lost. If you prefer the old icons,
125 you can continue to use them by upgrading rEFInd, renaming icons-backup
126 to something else (say, icons-classic), and then adding an "icons" line
127 in refind.conf to point to the old icons directory.
128
129 - Changed from .zip to .tar.gz as source code archive format. I did this
130 because Linux is the only officially-supported build platform, and
131 tarballs are a more natural fit to a Linux environment. I'm leaving .zip,
132 .deb, and .rpm files as the formats for binary packages.
133
134 - Added detection of System Integrity Protection (SIP; aka "rootless") mode
135 to OS X portion of install.sh script. When detected, and if no existing
136 rEFInd installation is found, the script now prints a warning and brief
137 instructions of how to enter the Recovery mode to install rEFInd and
138 suggests aborting the installation. (The user can override and attempt
139 installation anyhow.) If SIP is detected along with an existing rEFInd
140 installation, the script moderates the warning and explains that an
141 update of a working rEFInd will probably succeed, but that re-installing
142 to fix a broken rEFInd will probably fail.
143
144 - Added new "spoof_osx_version" token, which takes an OS X version number
145 (such as "10.9") as an option. This feature, when enabled, causes rEFInd
146 to tell a Mac's firmware that the specified version of OS X is being
147 launched. This option is usually unnecessary, but it can help properly
148 initialize some hardware -- particularly secondary video devices. OTOH,
149 on some Macs it can cause hardware (notably keyboards and mice) to become
150 unresponsive, so you should not use this option unnecessarily.
151
152 - Worked around an EFI bug that affected my 32-bit Mac Mini: That system
153 seems to have a broken EFI, or possibly a buggy CPU, that causes some
154 (but not all) conversions from floating-point to integer numbers to hang
155 the computer. Such operations were performed only in rEFInd's
156 graphics-resizing code, and so would manifest only when icons or
157 background images were resized. My fix eliminates the use of
158 floating-point operations in the affected function, which eliminates the
159 crashes. There may be some degradation in the quality of resized images,
160 though, particularly on 32-bit systems. (64-bit systems use larger
161 integers, which enable greater precision in my floating-point
162 workaround.)
163
164 - Under OS X, install.sh can now be run from the recovery system. This may
165 help work around OS X 10.11's problems with System Integrity Protection,
166 since it should be possible to reboot into the recovery system to install
167 rEFInd without disabling SIP for the main installation, even for just one
168 boot.
169
170 0.9.2 (9/19/2015):
171 ------------------
172
173 - Added "--keepname" option to install.sh. This option causes install.sh
174 to keep refind_x64.efi named as such rather than rename it as grubx64.efi
175 when using Shim. This option is meaningful only if the --shim option is
176 also used. This option passes the refind_x64.efi filename as an option to
177 Shim, which overrides the default filename of grubx64.efi. A big caveat:
178 Only Shim 0.7 and later supports this feature. (Shim 0.4 also works if a
179 refind_x64.efi is referred to as "\refind_x64.efi" on the command line,
180 but the need for a leading backslash to refer to a file in the same
181 directory as Shim is so confusing and wrong that I cannot in good
182 conscience support it.) I've not seen signed Shim binaries between 0.4
183 and 0.7, so I don't know if any of them might work.
184
185 - Implemented a workaround for a bug in Shim 0.8 that prevented
186 authentication of more than one binary. If any filesystem drivers were
187 installed, the first one would be verified, leaving rEFInd unable to
188 launch anything else unless it was signed by a key in the computer's main
189 Secure Boot db list.
190
191 0.9.1 (9/13/2015):
192 ------------------
193
194 - When rEFInd identifies the root (/) partition via the Freedesktop.org
195 Discoverable Partitions Specification, it now checks two of the
196 partition's attributes, as per the DPS (see
197 http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/DiscoverablePartitionsSpec/):
198 - The partition's read-only attribute determines whether to pass a "rw"
199 or "ro" option to the kernel.
200 - If the partition's do-not-automount flag is set, rEFInd will not pass
201 it as a "root=" option to the kernel. This flag can be used to remove
202 all but one partition from consideration as a root (/) partition if a
203 system has more than one with the correct type code.
204
205 - Improved Freedesktop.org Discoverable Partitions Specification support:
206 Previously, if no refind_linux.conf file was present but an /etc/fstab
207 file was found, rEFInd ignored the Discoverable Partitions Specification
208 filesystem-type codes. This was fine if /etc/fstab contained a valid "/"
209 filesystem specification, but if that was absent, the result was no
210 "root=" specification being present. Under these circumstances
211 (refind_linux.conf absent, /etc/fstab present but lacking a "/" entry),
212 rEFInd now tries to identify a device to specify as "root=" via the
213 Discoverable Partitions Specification.
214
215 - Fixed bug that caused "Found match!" and a prompt to press a key to
216 continue to be printed if any partition used the Freedesktop.org
217 Discoverable Partitions Specification root-partition GUID. (This
218 was leftover debugging/testing code that I somehow missed deleting.)
219
220 - Added icon for Elementary OS.
221
222 - Added /etc/lsb-release to files scanned for clues about the Linux
223 distribution. This file differentiates Mint and Elementary OS from Ubuntu
224 better than does /etc/os-release, and may also help with other
225 closely-related distributions.
226
227 - Improvements to handling of case-insensitive string comparisons. These
228 are buggy on some EFIs, and such bugs affect things like dont_scan_*
229 blacklists, removal of rEFInd's own directory from scanning, matching of
230 keyword names in refind.conf, and even loading of icons. I've replaced
231 many calls to problematic functions with safer calls, which should help a
232 lot. There may still be problems on some systems with some computers,
233 though; as far as I can tell, the bugs are buried deep in some EFI
234 firmware, so I can only replace some of the most direct calls to
235 potentially buggy system calls.
236
237 0.9.0 (7/26/2015):
238 ------------------
239
240 - New icon for Kali Linux, submitted by Francesco D'Eugenio.
241
242 - Minor code changes to ensure that rEFInd compiles with GCC 5.1. (Tested
243 with GNU-EFI on a Fedora 22 system; not yet tested with the TianoCore
244 EDK2.)
245
246 - Added new "fold_linux_kernels" token to refind.conf. This option, when
247 active (the default) "folds" all Linux kernels in a directory into a
248 single entry on the rEFInd menu. The kernel with the most recent time
249 stamp is launched by default. To launch another kernel, you must press F2
250 or Insert; additional kernels appear as options on the first kernel's
251 submenu. To see the pre-0.9.0 behavior, you must set "fold_linux_kernels
252 false" (or one of its synonyms, "off" or "0"). The point of this option
253 is to help de-clutter the rEFInd main menu.
254
255 - Added new Linux root (/) partition auto-discovery feature, based on
256 Freedesktop.org's Discoverable Partitions Spec (DPS)
257 (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/DiscoverablePartitionsSpec/):
258 If no refind_linux.conf file or /etc/fstab file is found, and if a
259 partition with the correct DPS type code for the system architecture is
260 found, rEFInd adds "ro root=/dev/disk/by-partuuid/{GUID}" to the kernel
261 options. This will not help on LVM setups, and will get it right for only
262 one installation on systems with multiple Linux installations, but it may
263 help some users, if/when the DPS type codes become more common.
264
265 - Fixed bug that caused a rEFInd crash if an empty refind_linux.conf
266 file was encountered.
267
268 - The mkrlconf.sh script now checks the OS on which it's running, which
269 should help avoid confusion or problems by users who mistakenly run it
270 under OS X.
271
272 - rEFInd now skips checking for various BIOS-mode boot sector signatures
273 when running on a UEFI-based PC; these checks are run only on Macs. This
274 may reduce startup time on systems with many partitions.
275
276 - Fixed Debian debinstall script to work correctly on IA32 systems. It had
277 a bug that caused filesystem drivers and gptsync to not be packaged for
278 IA32.
279
280 - Modified Debian postinst file to call install.sh with --localkeys option
281 if sbsign and openssl are available, even when NOT in Secure Boot mode or
282 if shim is not detected. This helps with my Ubuntu PPA when using custom
283 Secure Boot keys, since the PPA is delivered unsigned. (Users will have
284 to have added their own local keys to their firmware's db.) For
285 consistency, I've made the same change to the RPM .spec file.
286
287 0.8.7 (3/1/2015):
288 -----------------
289
290 - Fixed install.sh bug that caused inappropriate installation under the
291 name bootx64.efi (or bootia32.efi) under Linux, with a failure to update
292 the boot entries in NVRAM, has been fixed.
293
294 - Added identification of XFS as filesystem type in volume descriptions.
295
296 - More fixes to filesystem type detection code. Previous version sometimes
297 identified FAT or NTFS (or anything with a boot loader) as a whole-disk
298 device rather than the correct filesystem type.
299
300 - Added protections to the code to reduce the risk of crashes that might
301 occur when dereferencing NULL pointers in various situations.
302
303 - I'm deprecating the use of filesystem numbers (as in "fs0:") because
304 they're unreliable -- filesystem numbers can change between boots and
305 might not be the same as those used in an EFI shell or other program.
306 Sooner or later I'll remove code supporting this feature. In the
307 meantime, if it doesn't work for you, please switch to using filesystem
308 labels, partition labels, or partition GUIDs.
309
310 - Added detection of FreeBSD's BIOS-mode GPT boot loader. Previously,
311 rEFInd could detect FreeBSD's BIOS-mode MBR boot loader, which gave
312 FreeBSD an appropriate icon on Macs; but the BIOS-mode GPT boot loader
313 code is different, so some recent FreeBSD installations showed up with
314 generic grey diamond icons. This change creates FreeBSD icons instead.
315
316 - Added "Secure Boot [active|inactive]" notice to "about" menu for x86
317 (32-bit) systems, since there are now a few 32-bit UEFI systems that
318 support Secure Boot. (AFAIK, these are mostly tablets and convertibles
319 such as the ASUS T100.)
320
321 - Added KeyTool.efi and KeyTool-signed.efi to list of MOK managers. KeyTool
322 is the "super-deluxe" Secure Boot key and hash manager provided as part
323 of the efitools package.
324
325 - Fixed more instances of "invalid parameter" errors on some EFIs.
326
327 - Improved Secure Boot detection in install.sh.
328
329 - install.sh should no longer complain when copying Shim or MokManager over
330 itself.
331
332 0.8.6 (2/8/2015):
333 -----------------
334
335 - Removed special case of ignoring an HFS+ name of "HFS+ volume", since the
336 old rEFInd HFS+ driver that produced this name for all HFS+ volumes has
337 long since been updated to deliver a real name.
338
339 - Addition of new Windows 8 OS icon. On Macs and for BIOS/legacy boots, the
340 new icon is now used for Windows Vista, 7, and 8, while the old one is
341 used for earlier versions of Windows. For EFI-mode boots, the new icon is
342 used universally.
343
344 - If the NTFS driver is loaded, rEFInd now scans NTFS volumes on Macs for
345 the presence of Windows boot files, and removes any NTFS volume that
346 lacks such files from the BIOS/legacy boot list. This should help
347 unclutter the display on Macs that contain NTFS data partitions.
348
349 - Fixed bug that caused misidentification of both whole disks and NTFS
350 volumes as being FAT. (This bug affected the identification of devices
351 and locations in the rEFInd menu, not actual access to devices.)
352
353 - Code refactoring to clear out legacy-boot functions from the
354 ever-expanding refind/main.c file.
355
356 - Added new "badges" option to the "hideui" token in refind.conf. This
357 option hides the device-type badges associated with the OS boot options.
358
359 - Reverted rEFIt commit r472, introduced in rEFInd 0.8.5 to support more
360 BMP images because I've received bug reports that it's causing existing
361 selection images to fail to load.
362
363 - Fixed install.sh bug that caused misidentification of installation
364 directory under OS X if an already-mounted ESP has spaces in its path.
365
366 - Fixed Mac-specific install.sh bug that could cause misidentification of
367 the ESP on disks with partition numbers of 10 or above.
368
369
370 0.8.5 (2/1/2015):
371 -----------------
372
373 - Added NTFS EFI filesystem driver.
374
375 - Minor improvements to filesystem driver framework code.
376
377 - Changes to
378
379 - Fixed bug in Btrfs driver's address reference.
380
381 - Improved install.sh to make it smarter about figuring out where to
382 install on Macs. Specifically, this version now upgrades existing
383 installations, if found (as it always has under Linux), rather than
384 blindly install to EFI/BOOT; it installs to EFI/refind if not existing
385 installation is found; it installs using the --shortform option to bless,
386 which seems to eliminate the 30-second delay problem; and it can handle
387 an HFS+ ESP, which it treats as a separate HFS+ volume (as if the user
388 had used --ownhfs). These changes do not affect behavior under Linux.
389
390 - Added missing check of architecture type for several tools.
391
392 - Applied rEFIt commit r472, which adds support for BMP images with negative
393 height fields, indicating that the image is NOT vertically flipped. This
394 commit and r467 were not incorporated in the original rEFInd because I
395 forked it from a Debian rEFIt package that had been patched to build
396 under GNU-EFI, and was apparently based on a slightly earlier version.
397
398 - Applied rEFIt commit r467, which improves Mac handling of legacy boots
399 from other than the first hard disk.
400
401
402 0.8.4 (12/8/2014):
403 ------------------
404
405 - Tweaked default for dont_scan_volumes: Removed "Recovery HD". This change
406 better suits the needs of OS X 10.10 ("Yosemite") installations, but may
407 result in some stray Recovery HD entries on some Macs.
408
409 - Updated icons for Fedora and Ubuntu and added an icon for Xubuntu.
410
411 - Added new configuration option, "enable_and_lock_vmx", which sets an
412 Intel CPU feature that's required for some types of virtualization to
413 work. Most EFIs enable setting this feature in their own setup utilities,
414 but some (such as most Macs) don't.
415
416 - If rEFInd can't locate an icons directory (either the default or one
417 specified by the icons_dir token), the program switches to text-only
418 mode.
419
420 - If a loader contains the string "grub" and no other clue to the loader's
421 OS association exists, search for os_grub.{png|icns} (which is not
422 provided with rEFInd) or os_linux.{png|icns}. (Previous versions provided
423 a generic loader icon for GRUB.)
424
425 - Fixed bug that caused dont_scan_files to not work with special-case
426 boot loaders (for OS X and Windows) when specifying the complete path to
427 the loader (e.g., EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi).
428
429 - Added support for the iPXE network boot tool (see BUILDING.txt for
430 building and basic use instructions).
431
432 0.8.3 (7/6/2014):
433 -----------------
434
435 - Added new feature: Setting "timeout = -1" in refind.conf causes rEFInd to
436 immediately boot the default option UNLESS a keypress is in the buffer
437 when rEFInd launches. In that case, if the keypress corresponds to a
438 shortcut key, the associated boot loader is launched; or if not, the menu
439 is displayed.
440
441 - Added new icons for Clover boot loader and for Mythbuntu Linux
442 distribution.
443
444 - rEFInd now displays the partition's label, when one is available, when
445 offering a BIOS-mode boot option for a partition with no filesystem
446 driver. This works only on Macs doing BIOS-mode booting.
447
448 - Removed GPLv2 code from the FSW core files. This was done because the
449 Btrfs driver is derived from the GRUB Btrfs driver, which is licensed
450 under the GPLv3. Ironically, the GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible
451 licenses, so ensuring that the Btrfs driver doesn't rely on GPLv2 code
452 was legally necessary. In most cases, I reverted to the original rEFIt
453 code, although I kept my own cache code; since I wrote it, I can
454 change its license to a BSD license.
455
456 - Fixed bug that caused rEFInd to unload drivers immediately after loading
457 them. This didn't affect rEFInd's own drivers because they didn't include
458 the unload hooks, but it did affect some other drivers.
459
460 - Changed default scan_all_linux_kernels setting from "false" to "true",
461 and commented the option out in refind.conf-sample. This should not
462 affect most people, since refind.conf-sample had this option commented
463 out, and most rEFInd users either use it that way or don't have Linux
464 kernels installed at all. I've made this change because I want rEFInd to
465 "do the right thing" by default in as many cases as possible. For a while
466 now, rEFInd has been excluding non-bootable files from its menu, and most
467 kernels "in the wild" now include the EFI stub. Thus, enabling this
468 support by default seems worthwhile. If you prefer to not scan Linux
469 kernels by default, simply uncomment the "scan_all_linux_kernels" line
470 and ensure it's set to "false".
471
472 0.8.2.1 (6/8/2014):
473 -------------------
474
475 - Removed stray bit of debugging code that caused a prompt to press a
476 key to appear at rEFInd startup.
477
478 0.8.2 (6/8/2014):
479 -----------------
480
481 - Changed behavior when default_selection is not set: It now boots the
482 previously-booted loader, assuming it's still available; if not, rEFInd
483 boots the first loader (as it does now). Behavior is unchanged if
484 default_selection is set. Note that this behavior depends on the ability
485 of rEFInd to store an EFI variable in NVRAM. It therefore fails on
486 systems with flaky NVRAM storage. You can view the previously-booted
487 loader in the
488 /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/PreviousBoot-36d08fa7-cf0b-42f5-8f14-68df73ed3740
489 variable under Linux.
490
491 - Added icon for Mageia Linux (os_mageia.png).
492
493 - Fixed bug that could misidentify a not-quite-GUID as a GUID in a
494 manual boot stanza's "volume" line.
495
496 - I've updated my personal build system, and therefore the rEFInd Makefiles
497 and related files, to use TianoCore UDK2014 rather than UDK2010.
498
499 - Added "deep_uefi_legacy_scan" token. When not set (the default), rEFInd
500 does not modify EFI NVRAM settings when scanning for BIOS-mode boot
501 loaders on UEFI-based (non-Mac) computers. Some computers require
502 uncommenting this setting for rEFInd to reliably detect some BIOS-mode
503 boot devices. Passing "0", "off", or "false" as an option resets it to
504 the default value (useful in a loaded secondary configuration file to
505 override a setting in the main file).
506
507 0.8.1 (5/15/2014):
508 ------------------
509
510 - Fixed bug that could cause rEFInd to fail to detect boot loaders stored
511 on the root directory of a partition.
512
513 - Added two new bitmap fonts to those distributed with rEFInd: Ubuntu Mono
514 and Nimbus Mono. Both come in 12-, 14-, 16-, and 24-point sizes.
515
516 - Messages about pauses for scanning and re-scanning of boot loaders are
517 now suppressed when doing an initial delayed scan when scan_delay is 1
518 second.
519
520 - Improved centering of legacy boot option descriptions on some systems'
521 screens.
522
523 - Fixed bug that could cause a BIOS-mode boot to boot from an inappropriate
524 device if that device had an innately high boot priority (as set by the
525 firmware).
526
527 - Changed icons from ICNS to PNG form. There are several reasons to do
528 this, all of them minor; but together they're enough to warrant a change.
529 PNG is more common, and therefore more accessible to most users --
530 particularly those who don't use OS X. The PNG files are smaller than
531 their ICNS equivalents. PNG supports a wider range of sizes (although I'm
532 not now using anything that ICNS doesn't support, I might in the future).
533 The icon-scaling support added a few versions ago makes ICNS's support
534 for multiple icon sizes relatively unimportant.
535
536 - Reversed order of search for icons by extension: rEFInd now searches
537 for PNG files before ICNS files, rather than the other way around. This
538 makes it possible to override a volume icon for rEFInd by giving it the
539 name .VolumeIcon.png, even when a .VolumeIcon.icns file exists on the
540 volume and is used by OS X.
541
542 - Fixed bug that caused .VolumeIcon.icns to take higher-than-intended
543 precedence in icon setting for OS X.
544
545 - Chainloading to BIOS-mode boot loaders now works on UEFI-based PCs when
546 rEFInd is built with GNU-EFI, not just when built with Tianocore.
547
548 0.8.0 (5/4/2014):
549 -----------------
550
551 - The "dont_scan_volumes" parameter now also works with legacy-boot
552 volumes. Unlike with EFI volumes, where the option you pass must exactly
553 match an entire volume name, when applied to legacy-boot volumes, it
554 matches any part of the description that appears beneath the item when
555 you select it in the rEFInd main menu.
556
557 - Can now boot in legacy mode from second (and probably later) hard disks!
558
559 - rEFInd now limits the length of the firmware name string shown in the
560 system information screen to 65 characters. This is done because at least
561 one EFI presents a longer string by default, and this causes the entire
562 information display to come up empty on 800x600 displays.
563
564 - rEFInd now uses the partition's name (as stored in the GPT data
565 structures) as a fallback for the filesystem's name if the latter can't
566 be found. Exceptions are if the partition name is one of three generic
567 names used by GPT fdisk: "Microsoft basic data", "Linux filesystem", or
568 "Apple HFS/HFS+". These are ignored in favor of the descriptive fallback
569 (e.g., "20 GiB Btrfs volume")
570
571 - It's now possible to specify a volume by partition GUID number in a
572 manual boot stanza. This should be more reliable (albeit also more
573 awkward) than using a filesystem number (such as fs0: or fs1:).
574
575 - Fixed memory-allocation bug that could cause error message displays,
576 and possibly hangs, when re-scanning boot loaders.
577
578 0.7.9 (4/20/2014):
579 ------------------
580
581 - Attempt to fix rEFInd perpetually re-scanning after ejecting a disc on
582 some Macs.
583
584 - Added check to remove redundant (or non-functional if Secure Boot is
585 active) kernel entries for Ubuntu, which is now including two versions of
586 kernels, one signed and the other unsigned.
587
588 - Fixed bug in install.sh that could cause it to display error messages
589 if the dmraid utility was not installed.
590
591 - The HFS+ driver now reports a correct volume name.
592
593 - Fixed some EFI filesystem driver bugs that could cause lockups under
594 some circumstances. These bugs could affect any of the filesystem
595 drivers.
596
597 - Added "gdisk" option to the "showtools" configuration file token. When
598 active, this adds gdisk.efi or gdisk_{arch}.efi, if present in the
599 EFI\tools directory, to the tools row.
600
601 - Fixed mistaken identification of the MOK utility as the "MOK utility
602 utility."
603
604
605 0.7.8 (3/9/2014):
606 -----------------
607
608 - Added "debian" directory to source, which facilitates creation of Debian
609 packages. Packages built in this way are built with GNU-EFI and don't run
610 any post-installation script, so although the rEFInd binaries are on the
611 hard disk, they aren't installed to be bootable; you must manually run
612 install.sh. Also, at least on Ubuntu, the Make.common file's /usr/lib64
613 references must be changed to /usr/lib. This is more of a proof of
614 concept and a "leg up" for distribution maintainers than anything else.
615
616 - Two new options, big_icon_size and small_icon_size, set the size of
617 the first-row OS icons and of the second-row tool icons, respectively.
618 The big_icon_size option also indirectly sets the size of disk-type
619 badges; they're 1/4 the size of the big icons. Default values are 128 and
620 48, respectively, to match the actual icon files provided with rEFInd. If
621 the icon you're using is of a different size than you've specified,
622 rEFInd scales it. For best quality, you should both provide icons drawn
623 to the right size and set the icon sizes in refind.conf.
624
625 - rEFInd now automatically scales icons to fit the standard icon sizes.
626 This won't have any effect with the icons that come with rEFInd, but it
627 can help if you want to use another icon, since you needn't scale it in a
628 graphics program before using it. Note that rEFInd uses bitmap icons, so
629 scaling by a huge amount (say, a 16x16 icon to fit the standard 128x128
630 OS icon) is not likely to look good.
631
632 - Added new option, banner_scale, that tells rEFInd how to handle banners:
633 Set to "noscale" (the default), banners are not scaled, although they'll
634 be cropped if they're too big for the display. This is the same as the
635 behavior in previous versions. Set to "fillscreen", rEFInd now scales the
636 banner image (larger or smaller) to fill the display.
637
638 - Adjusted the post-installation script in refind.spec (used to generate
639 RPMs, and therefore also indirectly Debian packages) to search for
640 existing shim program files under the filesnames shim.efi and shimx64.efi
641 rather than just shim.efi. Ubuntu uses shimx64.efi, so Debian packages
642 were failing to detect Ubuntu's shim in previous versions. (Note,
643 however, that Ubuntu's early shim 0.1 is unsuitable for use with rEFInd
644 The newer 0.4 version that's in the repositories now should work fine;
645 it's only when installing on an older system that's NOT been updated that
646 problems might arise.
647
648 0.7.7 (1/3/2014):
649 -----------------
650
651 - Can now specify complete paths, optionally including volumes, in
652 dont_scan_files.
653
654 - Added shimx64.efi to the default dont_scan_files list.
655
656 - Added windows_recovery_files token, to specify what program(s) launch a
657 Windows recovery utility; and the "windows_recovery" option to
658 "showtools," to control whether or not to display the Windows recovery
659 utility on the second row of icons.
660
661 - The use_graphics_for, also_scan_dirs, dont_scan_dirs, dont_scan_files,
662 and scan_driver_dirs tokens in refind.conf now support "+" as the first
663 option, which causes the remaining options to be added to the default
664 value rather than replacing that value. (This has no practical effect for
665 scan_driver_dirs, though, since it has a null default value.)
666
667 - Added support for specifying the configuration file at program launch,
668 via the "-c" parameter, as in "refind_x64.efi -c foo.conf" to use the
669 foo.conf file as the main configuration file.
670
671 - Scans of ext2/3/4fs and ReiserFS partitions now omit partitions with
672 duplicate filesystem UUIDs. These are likely parts of RAID arrays and so
673 would have the same boot loaders or kernels as the first one with a given
674 UUID.
675
676 - Added feature in install.sh: Script now tries to locate and mount an ESP
677 in Linux, if it's currently unmounted.
678
679 - Fixed bug in mkrlconf.sh and install.sh that caused a stray line break
680 and PARTUUID= specification to appear in generated refind_linux.conf file
681 under some circumstances.
682
683 0.7.6 (12/15/2013):
684 -------------------
685
686 - Added support for multiple "default_selection" targets. These MUST be
687 comma-separated AND enclosed in quotes, as in:
688 default_selection "fred,ginger"
689 This example will launch "fred" by default if it's available; and if
690 it's not, rEFInd will attempt to launch "ginger" as the default.
691
692 - Added support for time-sensitive "default_selection" setting. This token
693 may now have either one or three options. If one, it's interpreted as it
694 has been in the past, as setting a default that's independent of times.
695 If you follow this default by two times, however, those are interpreted
696 as the start and end times (in 24-hour format) for a default setting. For
697 instance, "default_selection foo 8:00 17:00" causes foo to be the default
698 from 8:00 (AM) to 17:00 (aka 5:00 PM). You can include multiple
699 "default_selection" lines to set different defaults for a variety of
700 times. If they're in conflict, the last one takes precedence. Note that
701 times are hardware clock's native value, which may be local time or UTC,
702 depending on your computer.
703
704 - Added support for a blank-screen startup: Set "screensaver -1" and the
705 screen saver will be initialized when rEFInd starts. If you set a low
706 "timeout" value, the result will be a boot straight to the default OS
707 unless you hit a key soon after rEFInd starts. Once you hit a key, the
708 screensaver will be disabled.
709
710 - Added --ownhfs {target} option to install.sh. This option causes rEFInd
711 to install to an HFS+ partition in a way that's more consistent with the
712 way the Mac's native boot loader is installed. Note that you should NOT
713 install to an already-bootable partition with this option, since it will
714 overwrite the existing boot loader, which would render OS X unbootable.
715
716 0.7.5 (11/10/2013):
717 -------------------
718
719 - Fixed bug that caused unbootable exFAT partitions to show up as
720 bootable on Macs with BIOS/CSM/legacy boot options enabled.
721
722 - Fixed bug in install.sh that caused installs to the ESP on recent
723 versions of OS X to fail.
724
725 - Fixed bug that caused rEFInd to hang on some Macs when multiple EFI
726 drivers were present.
727
728 - Fixed bug that caused clear to default gray screen when launching OSes
729 with 'use_graphics_for' enabled, even when the rEFInd background is not
730 gray. Now rEFInd clears to the same background color used in its menu.
731 When launching OS X, though, the OS X boot loader will itself clear to
732 gray a second or so later; and when launching Linux, it will clear to
733 black a second or so later.
734
735 0.7.4.1 (8/25/2013):
736 --------------------
737
738 - My initial 0.7.4 release broke legacy-boot ability on Macs, so I quickly
739 released this version using the original 0.7.4 filenames to fix the
740 problem.
741
742 0.7.4 (8/25/2013):
743 ------------------
744
745 - Fixed options passing to loader to include loader's filename as the first
746 option. This omission had no effect on most boot loaders, but caused
747 VMware's mboot64.efi to fail.
748
749 - Added support for memtest86 as second-row option. Program must be
750 stored in EFI/tools, EFI/tools/memtest, EFI/tools/memtest86, EFI/memtest,
751 or EFI/memtest86; and must use the name memtest86.efi, memtest86_x64.efi,
752 memtest86x64.efi, or bootx64.efi (changing "x64" to "ia32" on IA-32
753 systems). The memtest86 program is scanned for when the "showtools"
754 option includes the "memtest" or "memtest86" token, which it does by
755 default.
756
757 - Added space to end of "Boot %s from %s" string; enables adding a space
758 to the end of the "default_selection" item (in quotes) to set a default
759 that matches a volume name that's identical to another one except for
760 extra characters at the end of the non-wanted volume's name.
761
762 - Fixed bug that could cause rEFInd to hang when launching boot loaders
763 under some conditions. (Launching from Firewire drives on Macs is the
764 known case, but there may be others.)
765
766 0.7.3 (8/7/2013):
767 -----------------
768
769 - Fixed bug that caused missing media-type badges on BIOS-mode boot
770 loaders on Macs.
771
772 - Fixed bug that caused failure when launching BIOS-mode OSes on Macs.
773
774 0.7.2 (8/6/2013):
775 -----------------
776
777 - Fixed bug that caused display glitches in the final entry on the first
778 row of icons if the second row of icons was empty.
779
780 - Fixed bug that could cause incorrect scanning or even a rEFInd crash when
781 using volume specification in also_scan_dirs token.
782
783 - Added protection against loading invalid drivers and other EFI programs.
784 (Some EFIs crash when attempting to load such drivers and programs.)
785
786 - Added PreLoader.efi and shim-fedora.efi to default dont_scan_files list;
787 it's now "shim.efi, shim-fedora.efi, PreLoader.efi, TextMode.efi,
788 ebounce.efi, GraphicsConsole.efi, MokManager.efi, HashTool.efi,
789 HashTool-signed.efi".
790
791 - Added icon for Funtoo Linux.
792
793 - Fixed reading of volume badges from user-specified icons directory, which
794 was broken.
795
796 - Fixed handling of /.VolumeBadge.icns (or /.VolumeBadge.png) files, which
797 was broken.
798
799 0.7.1 (7/8/2013):
800 -----------------
801
802 - Fixed build problem with recent development versions of EDK2.
803
804 - Added scan for Boot Repair's backup of the Windows boot loader
805 (bkpbootmgfw.efi). If found, give separate entries for it and for
806 bootmgfw.efi, each with its own descriptive text label.
807
808 - Fixed also_scan_dirs; used to have bug that caused it to ignore
809 volume specification, if present.
810
811 - Fixed bug in driver cache that caused Btrfs driver to hang sometimes.
812
813 0.7.0 (6/27/2013):
814 ------------------
815
816 - Added Btrfs signature to rEFInd, so that it can identify the filesystem
817 type for volumes that lack labels.
818
819 - Changed some critical filesystem driver pointers from 32-bit to 64-bit.
820 This *SHOULD* enable use of over-2TiB filesystems (for those filesystems
821 that support such large volumes). This capability is largely untested,
822 though.
823
824 - Added a cache to the filesystem driver core, and therefore to all the
825 filesystem drivers. This cache greatly improves performance in
826 VirtualBox, and offers modest performance improvements on a few "real"
827 computers. The most dramatic improvement is on ext2/3fs under VirtualBox:
828 Loading a kernel and initrd used to take ~200 seconds on my system, but
829 now takes ~3 seconds! On most "real" hardware, the improvement is much
830 less dramatic -- an improvement of a second or less, presumably because
831 of cacheing within the EFI or on the hard disk itself.
832
833 - Filter boot loaders based on a test of their validity; keeps out Linux
834 kernels without EFI stub loader code, loaders for the wrong architecture,
835 non-EFI loaders, etc.
836
837 - New Btrfs driver, contributed by Samuel Liao based on GRUB 2.00 Btrfs
838 code.
839
840 0.6.12 (6/18/2013):
841 -------------------
842
843 - Changed the 64-bit EFI shell included in the CD-R and USB flash drive
844 images to a version 2 shell that should support the "bcfg" command.
845
846 - Added support for PreBootloader to refind.spec's built-in installation
847 script.
848
849 - Added support for the Linux Foundation's PreLoader to install.sh. It's
850 treated just like shim, including using the --shim option (or, now,
851 --preloader); but it searches for and copies HashTool.efi rather than
852 MokManager.efi, and filenames are adjusted appropriately.
853
854 - Added code to determine Linux root filesystem from /etc/fstab file, if
855 it's on the same partition as the kernel and if the refind_linux.conf
856 file is not available. This enables rEFInd to boot Linux without any
857 rEFInd-specific configuration files on some (but not all) systems.
858
859 0.6.11 (5/13/2013):
860 -------------------
861
862 - New feature: rEFInd now ignores symbolic links to files on filesystems
863 that support them. This prevents the "vmlinuz" symbolic link that some
864 distributions create in the root directory from appearing in the loader
865 list. Note that this does NOT affect symbolic links to directories.
866
867 - Added icons for Lubuntu and Kubuntu.
868
869 - Improved the install.sh script so that it does a better job dealing with
870 directory names that contain spaces.
871
872 - rEFInd now tries to guess the Linux distribution type based on the kernel
873 filename (Fedora and RHEL only) or the "ID" or "NAME" variables in
874 /etc/os-release on the kernel's partition. None of these is guaranteed to
875 work. A fallback of the Tux penguin icon remains in place in case rEFInd
876 can't find anything substantive enough for a guess.
877
878 - Added "EFI\opensuse" to the locations searched for MOK utilities, since
879 OpenSUSE now uses that name.
880
881 - Renamed "Reboot to Firmware User Interface" to "Reboot to Computer Setup
882 Utility" in menu.
883
884 - Fixed bug in gptsync that caused it to hang if the disk had too few GPT
885 partitions to fill the MBR.
886
887 0.6.10 (5/5/2013):
888 ------------------
889
890 - Added support for "screensaver" token. If set to a positive integer, this
891 causes the screen to blank after the specified number of seconds of
892 inactivity. Pressing most keys (unfortunately NOT including Shift, Alt,
893 or Ctrl) will restore the display and restart the screen saver timeout.
894
895 - Added icon for ChromeOS (os_chrome.icns in the icons subdirectory).
896 ChromeBooks reportedly boots using the fallback filename, but if a user
897 wants to install rEFInd on a ChromeBook, renaming the original EFI/BOOT
898 directory to EFI/chrome and then installing rEFInd in the fallback
899 filename will bring up this new icon for ChromeOS.
900
901 - Added new option to reboot the computer into the firmware's user
902 interface. This option is active by default, or can be set via the
903 "firmware" option to the "showtools" token in refind.conf. It works
904 on only some computers, though; older computers lack this feature, and
905 when rEFInd is told to use this feature on such computers, the directive
906 is quietly ignored.
907
908 - Upgraded LodePNG library from version 20121216 to 20130415 and
909 restructured rEFInd-specific modifications to simplify future upgrades.
910
911 - Replaced hexadecimal error code with description if an error is
912 encountered when saving a screen shot.
913
914 - Enable multiple screen shots: Rather than naming all screen shots
915 "screenshot.bmp", the name is now "screenshot_###.bmp", where "###" is a
916 sequence number, starting with "001".
917
918 0.6.9 (4/25/2013):
919 ------------------
920
921 - Modified default banner to include the new rEFInd icon, provided by Erik
922 Kemperman.
923
924 - Worked around a suspected firmware bug that caused rEFInd 0.6.6 to 0.6.8
925 to hang at startup on some systems (DUET and some Macs).
926
927 - Modified rEFInd to search for gptsync under the names gptsync.efi and
928 gptsync_{arch}.efi, where {arch} is ia32 or x64. (Previous versions
929 searched only for gptsync.efi.)
930
931 - Added gptsync program from rEFIt project, but with some changes to
932 improve flexibility and make it less likely that UEFI users will
933 accidentally trash their systems.
934
935 - Changed timeout code so that the timeout continues if the keyboard is
936 disconnected. This can help in booting a headless server or a system with
937 a bluetooth or other keyboard that's not recognized by the EFI.
938
939 0.6.8 (3/18/2013):
940 ------------------
941
942 - Added workaround for presumed EFI bug that was causing "Invalid
943 Parameter" errors when scanning for boot loaders on some computers.
944
945 - Added search for an EFI shell called shell.efi in the root directory
946 (previously this name was only accepted in EFI\tools).
947
948 - Fixed bug in install.sh that caused it to fail on some systems (Fedora
949 18, for instance) because of a problem identifying the ESP.
950
951 - Fixed bug that caused icons named after boot loaders to not be used.
952
953 0.6.7 (2/3/2013):
954 -----------------
955
956 - Added a more explicit error message summarizing options when a launch of
957 a program results in a Secure Boot failure.
958
959 - Changed MOK tool detection to scan all volumes, not just the rEFInd
960 home volume. This is desirable because the Linux Foundation's HashTool
961 can only scan its own volume, making it desirable to place copies of this
962 program on every volume that holds EFI boot loader binaries.
963
964 - Added support for launching the Linux Foundation HashTool as a means of
965 managing MOKs (or MOK hashes, at any rate).
966
967 - Fixed bug that caused rEFInd to present an entry for itself as a
968 Microsoft OS if it was launched as EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi.
969
970 - Fixed bug that caused dont_scan_volumes option to be added to
971 also_scan_dirs list.
972
973 - Fixed dont_scan_volumes so that it works with OS X boot loaders.
974
975 - Fixed broken mixing of PNG and ICNS icons when using a user-specified
976 icons directory -- previously, an ICNS file in the default directory
977 would override a PNG file in the user-specified directory.
978
979 0.6.6 (1/26/2013):
980 ------------------
981
982 - rEFInd now ignores the fallback boot loader (EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi or
983 EFI/BOOT/bootia32.efi) if it's identical to another boot loader on
984 the same volume. This is intended to help unclutter the display on
985 systems that run Windows, since Windows tends to duplicate its own boot
986 loader under the fallback name.
987
988 - Added new "font" token to refind.conf, which enables specifying a font in
989 the form of a PNG file. This file must contain monospace glyphs for the
990 95 characters from ASCII 32 to 126 (space through tilde), inclusive, plus
991 a glyph to be displayed for characters outside of this range, for a total
992 of 96 glyphs.
993
994 - Replaced the old font (inherited from rEFInd) with an anti-aliased
995 version of Luxi Mono Regular 14 point.
996
997 - Fixed bug that caused rEFInd to ignore manual boot stanzas in files
998 included via the "include" token in refind.conf.
999
1000 - Fixed bug that caused ASSERT error on some systems (and conceivably a
1001 crash on startup on some) when default_selection line in refind.conf was
1002 commented out or empty.
1003
1004 - Fixed bug that caused "Binary is whitelisted" message to persist on
1005 screen after loading MOK-signed drivers in Secure Boot mode.
1006
1007 - Fixed bug that caused rEFInd to ignore the "icon" token in refind.conf
1008 manual boot stanzas.
1009
1010 - Fixed bug in install.sh that caused the script to fail to update
1011 drivers when rEFInd was installed in EFI/BOOT/.
1012
1013 0.6.5 (1/16/2013):
1014 ------------------
1015
1016 - Improved text color support: rEFInd now uses black text against light
1017 backgrounds and white text against dark backgrounds.
1018
1019 - Added support for PNGs as banners, icons, and selectors.
1020
1021 - Added icon for ALT Linux.
1022
1023 - Added "safemode" option to "hideui" token, to hide option to boot into
1024 safe mode for OS X ("-v -x" option to boot.efi).
1025
1026 - Added icon for Haiku (os_haiku.icns).
1027
1028 - Enable transparency of icons & main-menu text when the banner icon is
1029 sized to cover these areas.
1030
1031 - Fixed bug that could cause rEFInd to crash if fed a banner image that's
1032 too big. Note that "too big" can be substantially smaller than the screen
1033 resolution!
1034
1035 0.6.4 (1/8/2013):
1036 -----------------
1037
1038 - Revised install.sh to copy ext2fs driver, rather than ext4fs driver, for
1039 ext2/3 filesystems. This can help keep non-functional entries from links
1040 from /vmlinuz to /boot/vmlinuz out of the menu if the system uses ext4fs
1041 on root and ext2fs or ext3fs on /boot.
1042
1043 - Fixed a couple of memory management bugs that cause rEFInd to hang at
1044 startup on some systems.
1045
1046 0.6.3 (1/6/2013):
1047 -----------------
1048
1049 - Added the ability to specify a volume name or number in the
1050 "dont_scan_dirs" and "also_scan_dirs" tokens.
1051
1052 - Fixed a bug that caused removable EFI media to not appear in scan lists
1053 if rEFInd was installed as EFI/BOOT/boot{arch}.efi on a hard disk.
1054
1055 - Modified ISO-9660 driver so that it can handle discs with other than
1056 2048-byte sectors. This makes it useful for reading "hybrid ISO" images
1057 burned to USB flash disks.
1058
1059 - New mvrefind.sh script to move a rEFInd installation between a standard
1060 location (typically EFI/refind) and one of the fallback locations
1061 (EFI/BOOT or EFI/Microsoft/Boot). It can also do more exotic locations.
1062
1063 - The install.sh script now installs to EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi or
1064 EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi if it's run in BIOS mode. This is
1065 intended to give some chance of producing a bootable installation should
1066 a user accidentally install Linux in EFI mode and then install rEFInd
1067 from that installation.
1068
1069 - The install.sh script now tries to find an existing rEFInd installation
1070 and upgrade it, even if it's in EFI/BOOT or EFI/Microsoft/Boot rather
1071 than in EFI/refind.
1072
1073 - New "--yes" option to install.sh to help with unattended or automated
1074 installations (as from an RPM or Debian package).
1075
1076 0.6.2 (12/30/2012):
1077 -------------------
1078
1079 - Inclusion of a sample refind.spec file for the benefit of RPM
1080 distribution maintainers who might want to include rEFInd. It's a bit
1081 rough, but it gets you a good chunk of the way there....
1082
1083 - The EFI filesystem drivers can now be built with the GNU-EFI toolkit as
1084 well as with the TianoCore EDK2. See the BUILDING.txt file for details on
1085 how to build them with either toolkit. This improvement doesn't affect
1086 users of my binary packages, but it should make it easier for Linux
1087 distributions to adopt rEFInd into their package systems.
1088
1089 - Tweaked refind.inf file for better build results using "native" TianoCore
1090 EDK2 build process (vs. the Makefile-based build process that I use under
1091 Linux). This won't affect those who use my binary builds or build under
1092 Linux with the "make" command.
1093
1094 - Fixed bug that prevented Secure Boot launches from working when rEFInd
1095 was built with GNU-EFI rather than the TianoCore EDK2.
1096
1097 - Substantial reworking of Secure Boot code, based on James Bottomley's
1098 PreLoader program. This new code eliminates the limitation of launching
1099 just one driver in Secure Boot mode and is likely to be more reliable
1100 with future or obscure boot loaders. It should also work with non-x86-64
1101 systems, although this relies on a platform-specific shim program, which
1102 to date exists only for x86-64. The basic features are the same as before
1103 -- rEFInd relies on shim for authentication functions and will launch
1104 programs that are signed by Secure Boot keys, shim keys, or MOKs.
1105
1106 - Altered default for "textmode" option (when it's commented out) to not
1107 adjust the text mode at all. (Prior versions set it to mode 0 by
1108 default.)
1109
1110 0.6.1 (12/21/2012):
1111 -------------------
1112
1113 - Added "--root" option to install.sh, to enable installation of rEFInd
1114 to something other than the currently-running OS. This is intended for
1115 use on emergency discs.
1116
1117 - Thanks to Stefan Agner, the ext4fs driver now supports the "meta_bg"
1118 filesystem feature, which distributes metadata throughout the disk. This
1119 feature isn't used by default, but can be set at filesystem creation time
1120 by passing the "-O meta_bg,^resize_inode" option to mke2fs. (Using
1121 "^resize_inode" is necessary because meta_bg is incompatible with
1122 resize_inode, which IS used by default.) This feature can be used on
1123 ext3fs and ext2fs as well as on ext4fs, so the ext4fs driver can now
1124 handle some ext3fs and ext2fs partitions that the ext2fs driver can't
1125 handle.
1126
1127 - Fixed some screen resolution-setting bugs.
1128
1129 - Added the "words" that make up a filesystem's label (delimited by spaces,
1130 dashes, or underscores) to the list of bases used to search for OS icons.
1131 For instance, if the filesystem's label is "Arch", rEFInd searches for
1132 os_Arch.icns; if it's "Fedora 17", it searches for os_Fedora.icns and
1133 os_17.icns; and if it's "NEW_GENTOO", it searches for os_NEW.icns and
1134 os_GENTOO.icns.
1135
1136 - Refined hints displays to be more context-sensitive, particularly in text
1137 mode.
1138
1139 - Instead of displaying a blank filesystem label when a filesystem has
1140 none, rEFInd now displays the size and/or type of the filesystem, as in
1141 "boot EFI\foo\bar.efi from 200 MiB ext3 volume" rather than "boot
1142 EFI\foo\bar.efi from".
1143
1144 - Fixed a bug that caused the screen to clear after displaying an error
1145 message but before displaying the "Hit any key to continue" message when
1146 a boot loader launch failed.
1147
1148 0.6.0 (12/16/2012):
1149 -------------------
1150
1151 - Fixed a memory allocation bug that could cause a program crash when
1152 specifying certain values with the "also_scan_dirs", "dont_scan_volumes",
1153 "dont_scan_dirs", "dont_scan_files", and "scan_driver_dirs" refind.conf
1154 options.
1155
1156 - Modified Linux kernel initrd-finding code so that if an initrd is
1157 specified in refind_linux.conf, rEFInd will not add any initrd it finds.
1158 This enables an override of the default initrd, and is likely to be
1159 particularly helpful to Arch Linux users.
1160
1161 - Added ext4fs driver!
1162
1163 - Made "boot" the default value for "also_scan_dirs".
1164
1165 - Added identifying screen header to line editor.
1166
1167 - Fixed bug that caused rEFInd's display to be mis-sized upon return
1168 from a program that set the resolution itself.
1169
1170 - Adjusted "resolution" refind.conf parameter so that it can accept EITHER
1171 a resolution as width and height OR a single digit as a UEFI mode number
1172 (which is system-specific). This is done because some systems present the
1173 same mode twice in their mode lists, perhaps varying in refresh rate,
1174 monitor output, or some other salient characteristics; specifying the
1175 mode number enables selecting the higher-numbered mode, whereas using
1176 horizontal and vertical resolution values selects the lowest-numbered
1177 mode.
1178
1179 - Added "textmode" refind.conf parameter to set the text mode used in
1180 text-only displays, and for the line editor and boot-time handoff
1181 display even in graphics mode.
1182
1183 - Fixed bug that caused tools (shell, etc.) to launch when they were
1184 highlighted and F2 or Insert was pressed.
1185
1186 - Added "editor" option to the "hideui" token in refind.conf, which
1187 disables the boot options editor.
1188
1189 - Added hints text to rEFInd main menu and sub-menus. This can be disabled
1190 by setting the new "hints" option to the "hideui" token in refind.conf.
1191
1192 - Added "boot with minimal options" entry to refind_linux.conf file
1193 generated by install.sh. This entry boots without the options extracted
1194 from the /etc/default/grub file.
1195
1196 - Added keys subdirectory to main distribution, to hold public Secure
1197 Boot/shim keys from known sources.
1198
1199 - Changed install.sh --drivers option to --alldrivers, added new
1200 --nodrivers option, and made the default on Linux to install the one
1201 driver that's used on /boot (or the root filesystem if /boot isn't a
1202 separate partition). Of course, this won't install a non-existent driver,
1203 and it also won't work properly if run from an emergency disk unless you
1204 mount a separate /boot partition at that location.
1205
1206 - Fixed bug in install.sh that prevented creation of refind_linux.conf file
1207 on Linux systems.
1208
1209 0.5.1.1 (12/12/2012):
1210 ---------------------
1211
1212 - Fixed bug in install.sh that prevented it from working on OS X.
1213
1214 0.5.1 (12/11/2012):
1215 -------------------
1216
1217 - Added support for "0" options to "textonly" and "scan_all_linux_kernels"
1218 to reverse the usual meaning of these tokens. This is useful for
1219 including these options in a secondary configuration file called with the
1220 new "include" token to override a setting set in the main file.
1221
1222 - Added "include" token for refind.conf, to enable including a secondary
1223 configuration file from a primary one.
1224
1225 - Modified install.sh so that it creates a simple refind_linux.conf file in
1226 /boot, if that file doesn't already exist and if install.sh is run from
1227 Linux. If that directory happens to be on a FAT, HFS+, ext2fs, ext3fs, or
1228 ReiserFS volume, and if the necessary drivers are installed, the result
1229 is that rEFInd will detect the Linux installation with no further
1230 configuration on many systems. (Some may still require tweaking of kernel
1231 options, though; for instance, adding "dolvm" on Gentoo systems that use
1232 LVM.)
1233
1234 - Added --shim and --localkeys options to install.sh to help simplify setup
1235 on systems with Secure Boot active.
1236
1237 - Fixed (maybe) bug that caused resolution options to not be displayed on
1238 recent Macs with GOP graphics when specifying an invalid resolution in
1239 refind.conf.
1240
1241 - Fixed bug that caused some programs (EFI shells, in particular) to hang
1242 when launching on some systems (DUET, in particular).
1243
1244 - Implemented a fix to enable ELILO to launch with Secure Boot active.
1245 This fix might help with some other boot loaders in Secure Boot mode,
1246 too, but I don't know of any specifics.
1247
1248 0.5.0 (12/6/2012):
1249 ------------------
1250
1251 - Added the ability to include quote marks ('"') in refind.conf and
1252 refind_linux.conf tokens by doubling them up, as in:
1253 "ro root=/dev/sda4 some_value=""this is it"""
1254 This example results in the following string being passed as an
1255 option:
1256 ro root=/dev/sda4 some_value="this is it"
1257
1258 - Changed refind.conf-sample to uncomment the scan_all_linux_kernels
1259 option by default. If this option is deleted or commented out, the
1260 program default remains to not scan all Linux kernels; but with
1261 increasing numbers of distributions shipping with kernels that include
1262 EFI stub loader support, setting the configuration file default to scan
1263 for them makes sense.
1264
1265 - Modified the "resolution" token so that it affects text mode as well
1266 as graphics mode. On my systems, though, the actual text area is still
1267 restricted to an 80x25 area. (This seems to be a firmware limitation; my
1268 EFI shells are also so limited.)
1269
1270 - Fixed a bug that caused the options line editor to blank out lines that
1271 were not actually edited.
1272
1273 - Added support for using Matthew Garrett's Shim program and its Machine
1274 Owner Keys (MOKs) to extend Secure Boot capabilities. If rEFInd is
1275 launched from Shim on a computer with Secure Boot active, rEFInd will
1276 launch programs signed with either a standard UEFI Secure Boot key or a
1277 MOK. For the moment, this feature works only on x86-64 systems.
1278
1279 - Added new "dont_scan_files" (aka "don't_scan_files") token for
1280 refind.conf. The effect is similar to dont_scan_dirs, but it creates a
1281 blacklist of filenames within directories rather than directory names.
1282 I'm initially using it to place shim.efi and MokManager.efi in the
1283 blacklist to keep these programs out of the OS list. (MokManager.efi is
1284 scanned separately as a tool; see below.) I've moved checks for
1285 ebounce.efi, GraphicsConsole.efi, and TextMode.efi to this list. (These
1286 three had previously been blacklisted by hard-coding in ScanLoaderDir().)
1287
1288 - Added the directory from which rEFInd launched to dont_scan_dirs. This
1289 works around a bug in which rEFInd would show itself as a bogus Windows
1290 entry if it's installed as EFI/Microsoft/boot/bootmgfw.efi.
1291
1292 - Added support for launching MokManager.efi for managing the Machine Owner
1293 Keys (MOKs) maintained by the shim boot loader developed by Fedora and
1294 SUSE. This program is scanned and presented as a second-row tool.
1295
1296 - Added support for Apple's Recovery HD partition: If it's detected, a new
1297 icon appears on the second row. This icon can be removed by explicitly
1298 setting the "showtools" option in refind.conf and excluding the
1299 "apple_recovery" option from that line.
1300
1301 - Fixed bug that caused text-mode ("textonly" refind.conf option enabled)
1302 menu entries to be right-aligned rather than left-aligned when rEFInd was
1303 compiled with the TianoCore EDK2.
1304
1305 - Added "--usedefault {devicename}" and "--drivers" options to the
1306 install.sh script and changed the "esp" option to "--esp".
1307
1308 0.4.7 (11/6/2012):
1309 ------------------
1310
1311 - Added an icon for gummiboot.
1312
1313 - Added a boot option editor: Pressing the Insert or F2 key from a boot
1314 tag's options menu opens a simple text-mode line editor on which the boot
1315 options may be edited for a one-time boot with altered options.
1316
1317 - Modified the "scan_delay" feature to delay and then perform a re-scan,
1318 which may work better than the first attempt at this feature (which I'm
1319 told isn't working as planned).
1320
1321 - Modified rEFInd to add a space after the command-line options only when
1322 launching Mac OS X. On some early Macs, the extra space (which had been
1323 present by default, as a carryover from rEFIt) causes problems when
1324 booting Linux kernels from FAT partitions.
1325
1326 0.4.6 (10/6/2012):
1327 ------------------
1328
1329 - Fixed some minor memory management issues.
1330
1331 - Added new "scan_delay" feature to impose a delay before scanning
1332 for disks.
1333
1334 - Changed default "scanfor" option from internal-external-optical to either
1335 internal-external-optical-manual (for non-Macs) or
1336 internal-hdbios-external-biosexternal-optical-cd-manual (for Macs). I've
1337 done this for two reasons:
1338 - Many Mac users have been confused by the fact that rEFInd needs
1339 reconfiguration to detect Windows (or Linux installed in BIOS mode),
1340 since rEFIt scans BIOS devices by default. Adding the BIOS options as
1341 default for them should help them.
1342 - Adding the "manual" option enables users to simply add manual boot
1343 stanzas and have them work, which is more intuitive. Adding the
1344 "manual" option will have no effect unless manual stanzas are created
1345 or uncommented, so this part of the change won't affect users' working
1346 default configurations.
1347
1348 - Added new legacy (BIOS) boot support for UEFI-based PCs.
1349
1350 0.4.5 (8/12/2012):
1351 ------------------
1352
1353 - Fixed bug that caused a failure to boot BIOS-based OSes on Macs.
1354
1355 - Fixed bug in install.sh that caused it to fail to detect rEFItBlesser.
1356
1357 0.4.4 (6/23/2012):
1358 ------------------
1359
1360 - Fixed bug that caused filesystem labels to be corrupted by rEFInd on
1361 32-bit systems.
1362
1363 - Fixed bug that caused filesystem labels to be truncated in the drivers
1364 on 32-bit systems.
1365
1366 - Fixed bug in use_graphics_for option parsing that caused most options
1367 to set graphics mode for OS X and/or Linux but not other boot
1368 loaders/OSes.
1369
1370 - Tweaked install script to better isolate the ESP under OS X.
1371
1372 0.4.3 (6/21/2012):
1373 ------------------
1374
1375 - rEFInd now supports compilation using the TianoCore UDK2010/EDK2
1376 development kit in addition to GNU-EFI.
1377
1378 - Added new "use_graphics_for" option to control which OSes to boot in
1379 graphics mode. (This effect lasts for a fraction of a second on most
1380 systems, since the boot loader that rEFInd launches is likely to set
1381 graphics or text mode itself.)
1382
1383 - Graphics-mode booting now clears the screen to the current rEFInd
1384 background color (rather than black) and does NOT display boot messages.
1385 The intent is for a smoother transition when booting OS X, or perhaps
1386 other OSes that don't display boot loader messages. In practice, this
1387 effect will be tiny for many OSes, since the boot loader generally clears
1388 the screen within a fraction of a second of being launched; but the
1389 "flicker" of a rEFInd message in that time can sometimes be distracting.
1390
1391 - Filesystem drivers now work on EFI 1.x systems, such as Macs.
1392
1393 - Removed "linux.conf" as a valid alternative name for "refind_linux.conf"
1394 for holding Linux kernel options. The kernel developers plan to use
1395 "linux.conf" themselves.
1396
1397 0.4.2 (6/3/2012):
1398 -----------------
1399
1400 - Added a message to install.sh when run on Macs to remind users to update
1401 the "scanfor" line in refind.conf if they need to boot BIOS-based OSes
1402 via rEFInd.
1403
1404 - Modified install.sh script to be smarter about running efibootmgr on
1405 Linux. It now uses the whole path to the rEFInd binary as a key to
1406 determine whether an existing entry exists, rather than just the filename
1407 portion. If an entry exists and is the first entry in the boot order, the
1408 script does nothing to the NVRAM entries. If such an entry exists but is
1409 not the default, the script deletes that entry and creates a new one
1410 (implicitly making it the first in the boot order). If such an entry does
1411 not exist, the script creates a new one (again, making it the first in
1412 the boot order).
1413
1414 - Added "dont_scan_dirs" configuration file option, which adds directories
1415 to a "blacklist" of directories that are NOT scanned for boot loaders.
1416
1417 0.4.1 (5/25/2012):
1418 ------------------
1419
1420 - Added "scanning for new boot loaders" message to the re-scan function
1421 (hitting Esc at the main menu). It usually flashes up too quickly to
1422 be of importance, but if the scan function takes a while because of
1423 access to a CD that must be spun up, it should make it clear that the
1424 system hasn't hung.
1425
1426 - Modified install.sh script to detect rEFItBlesser on Macs, and if
1427 present, to ask the user if it should be removed.
1428
1429 - Cleaned up the Make.common file for the filesystem drivers.
1430
1431 - Changed HFS+ driver to return volume label of "HFS+ volume" rather than
1432 an empty label. (The driver doesn't currently read the real volume
1433 label.)
1434
1435 - Fixed bug that could cause rEFInd to appear in its own menu after
1436 running a shell and then re-scanning for boot loaders.
1437
1438 0.4.0 (5/20/2012):
1439 ------------------
1440
1441 - Inclusion of drivers for ISO-9660, HFS+, ReiserFS, and ext2fs. Most of
1442 these drivers originated with rEFIt, although the HFS+ driver seems to
1443 have come from Oracle's VirtualBox, with some files from Apple. I hadn't
1444 included these drivers previously because the build process proved
1445 challenging. As it is, they don't work on my Mac Mini, I suspect because
1446 the build process with the UDK2010 development kit may not work with the
1447 EFI 1.x that Apple uses.
1448
1449 - Addition of support for drivers in the "drivers_{arch}" subdirectory of
1450 the main rEFInd binary directory (e.g., "drivers_x64" or "drivers_ia32").
1451 Drivers may continue to be placed in the "drivers" subdirectory.
1452
1453 - Added new feature to eject CDs (and other removable media): Press F12 to
1454 eject all such media. This function works only on some Macs, though (it
1455 relies on an Apple-specific EFI extension, and this extension isn't even
1456 implemented on all Macs, much less on UEFI-based PCs).
1457
1458 - Fixed a problem that could cause GRUB 2 to fail to read its configuration
1459 file when launched from rEFInd.
1460
1461 0.3.5 (5/15/2012):
1462 ------------------
1463
1464 - Removed the GRUB 2 detection "reciped" added with 0.3.2, since I've
1465 received reports that it's not working as intended.
1466
1467 - Added re-scan feature: Press the Esc key to have rEFInd re-read its
1468 configuration file, tell the EFI to scan for new filesystems, and re-scan
1469 those filesystems for boot loaders. The main purpose is to enable
1470 scanning a new removable medium that you insert after launching rEFInd;
1471 however, it can also be used to immediately implement changes to the
1472 configuration file or new drivers you load from an EFI shell.
1473
1474 - Fixed a bug that could cause the scroll-right arrow to be replaced by the
1475 scroll-left arrow under some circumstances.
1476
1477 0.3.4 (5/9/2012):
1478 -----------------
1479
1480 - Added new configuration file option: "icons_dir", which sets the name
1481 of the subdirectory in which icons are found. See the documentation or
1482 sample configuration file for a full description.
1483
1484 - Modified Makefile to generate rEFInd binary that includes architecture
1485 code -- refind_ia32.efi or refind_x64.efi, rather than the generic
1486 refind.efi. This is done mainly to help the install.sh script. The
1487 program can be named anything you like on the disk. (The generic name
1488 refind.efi is used on unknown architectures.)
1489
1490 - Improved install.sh script: Fixed bug on OS X 10.7 and enable it to be
1491 used after building from source code (or via new "make install" Makefile
1492 target).
1493
1494 - Improved screen redraws to produce less flicker when moving among the
1495 second-row tags or to the last tag on the first row.
1496
1497 0.3.3 (5/6/2012):
1498 -----------------
1499
1500 - Improved menu navigation:
1501 - In graphics mode, left & right arrow keys move left & right, while up &
1502 down arrows move between rows.
1503 - Page Up and Page Down now move through chunks of visible tags (in both
1504 text & graphics modes), jumping from one row to another only when at
1505 the edge of the row. In text mode, the "rows" are broken down as in
1506 graphics mode, but they aren't visibly distinguished on the screen.
1507
1508 - Improved text-mode use: rEFInd now displays the proper number of entries
1509 when first started in text mode and scrolling is done sensibly when too
1510 many entries exist to fit on the screen.
1511
1512 0.3.2 (5/4/2012):
1513 -----------------
1514
1515 - Added the install.sh script to install rEFInd on Linux and Mac OS X
1516 systems. This script must be run as root (or via sudo). It requires
1517 no options, but on Mac OS X, passing it the "esp" option causes it
1518 to install rEFInd on the computer's ESP rather than the default of the
1519 currently OS X boot partition. (Under Linux, the default is to install to
1520 the ESP.) Note that there may be some unusual cases in which this script
1521 will fail to work.
1522
1523 - Does a better job of clearing the screen when launching OSes in text
1524 mode.
1525
1526 - Added detection "recipe" for GRUB 2's BIOS Boot Partition.
1527
1528 - Fixed bogus detection of ESPs created by Linux's mkdosfs utility or
1529 Windows as bootable partitions when "scanfor" includes BIOS scanning
1530 options.
1531
1532
1533 0.3.1 (4/27/2012):
1534 ------------------
1535
1536 - Fixed bug that caused spurious "Unsupported while scanning the root
1537 directory" messages under some conitions on Macs.
1538
1539 - Modified loader scanning code to sort boot loader entries within a
1540 directory by modification time, so that the most recently-modified loader
1541 is first among those in a given directory. Thus, if you specify a
1542 directory name (or volume name, for loaders stored in the root directory
1543 of a volume) as the default_selection, the most recent of those loaders
1544 will be the default. This is intended to help with Linux kernel
1545 maintenance when using the EFI stub loader; set up this way, the most
1546 recent kernel copied to your kernel directory will be the default,
1547 obviating the need to adjust the refind.conf file when adding a new
1548 kernel. If you want to change the default among those in the default
1549 directory, you can use "touch" to adjust the modification timestamp.
1550
1551 - Tweaked code to find loader-specific .icns file so that it finds files
1552 for Linux kernels without .efi extensions. In this case, files should be
1553 named the same as the kernels they match, but with .icns extensions. For
1554 instance, bzImage-3.3.2 should have an icon called bzImage-3.3.2.icns.
1555 (The old code would have looked for an icon called bzImage-3.3.icns.)
1556
1557 - Eliminated bogus OS loader tags for filenames that end in ".icns" when
1558 the scan_all_linux_kernels option is set.
1559
1560 0.3.0 (4/22/2012):
1561 ------------------
1562
1563 - I'm officially upgrading this project's status from "alpha" to "beta" and
1564 giving it a bump from 0.2.x to 0.3.0. This doesn't reflect any major
1565 milestone with this version; rather, it reflects my sense that rEFInd has
1566 been "out there" for a while, and although I've gotten bug reports,
1567 they've been minor and/or have been fixed. The program still has known
1568 bugs, but my impression is that it is, overall, usable by ordinary users.
1569
1570 - Added "resolution" option to refind.conf, which enables setting the video
1571 resolution. To use it, pass two numeric values, as in "resolution 1024
1572 768" to use a 1024x768 video mode. Note that not all modes are supported.
1573 If you specify a non-supported video mode on a UEFI system, a message
1574 appears listing the supported video modes and you must then press a key
1575 to continue, using the default video mode (usually 800x600).
1576 Unfortunately, I don't know the calls to get a list of supported video
1577 modes on older EFI 1.x systems (including Macs), so on Macs setting an
1578 incorrect video mode silently fails (you keep using the default mode).
1579 This makes changing your video mode a hit-or-miss proposition on Macs.
1580 CAUTION: It's possible to set a legal video mode that your monitor can't
1581 handle, in which case you'll get a blank display until you boot an OS
1582 that resets the video mode.
1583
1584 - Fixed (maybe) a bug that caused rEFInd to crash when returning from an
1585 EFI shell or other programs on Macs, particularly when rEFInd used
1586 graphical mode. I'm not 100% sure this bug is squashed because I still
1587 don't understand the cause and I only have one Mac for testing. See
1588 comments in the ReinitRefitLib() function in refit/lib.c for more
1589 details.
1590
1591 - Added new refind.conf option: scan_all_linux_kernels, which causes Linux
1592 kernels that lack ".efi" extensions to be included in scans for EFI boot
1593 loaders. This may help integration with Linux distributions that don't
1594 give their kernels such names by default. Beware, though: It can detect
1595 unwanted files, such as older non-stub-loader kernels or .icns files used
1596 to give kernels with .efi extensions custom icons.
1597
1598 - Improved EFI boot loader detection on boards with Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI,
1599 and perhaps other EFIs with a buggy StriCmp() function. Files with both
1600 ".efi" and ".EFI" extensions should now be detected as boot loaders.
1601
1602 - Fixed a bug that caused rEFInd to fail to scan for drivers if the
1603 filesystem driver didn't set a volume name (that is, if the relevant
1604 field was set to NULL rather than even an empty string). In such
1605 situations, rEFInd now reports the volume name as "Unknown".
1606
1607 0.2.7 (4/19/2012):
1608 ------------------
1609
1610 - After much trial and tribulation, I've overcome a GNU-EFI limitation and
1611 enabled rEFInd to load EFI drivers. This feature was present in the
1612 original build of rEFIt but was removed in the versions that could
1613 compile under Linux, but now it's back -- and still being compiled under
1614 Linux! To use it, you should place your drivers in a convenient directory
1615 on the ESP (or whatever partition you use to launch rEFInd) and add a
1616 "scan_driver_dirs" entry to refind.conf to tell rEFInd where to look. (As
1617 always, you should specify the driver directory relative to the root of
1618 the filesystem.) Note that you can't launch drivers from another
1619 filesystem; they must be on the same volume that holds rEFInd. Those who
1620 compile from source code should note that implementing this feature
1621 necessitated using a more recent version of the GNU-EFI library. I'm
1622 currently using version 3.0p, and version 3.0i does NOT work. I don't
1623 know where the change occurred, but you may need to upgrade your GNU-EFI
1624 installation.
1625
1626 - Fixed bug that caused rEFInd to show up in its own menu sometimes.
1627
1628 - Added new refind.conf token: also_scan_dirs. When scanning volumes for
1629 EFI boot loaders, rEFInd always scans the root directory and every
1630 subdirectory of the /EFI directory, but it doesn't recurse into these
1631 directories. The also_scan_dirs token adds more directories to the scan
1632 list. It defaults to "elilo,boot", but you can set it to any directory or
1633 directories you like.
1634
1635 0.2.6 (4/14/2012):
1636 ------------------
1637
1638 - Added "volume" keyword to configuration file's stanza options. This
1639 option changes the volume from which subsequent files (specified by
1640 "loader" and "icon") are loaded. You pass "volume" the name/label of the
1641 FILESYSTEM you want to use (not the GPT partition name), or a number
1642 followed by a colon (e.g., "1:"). The former should reliably identify a
1643 filesystem, assuming the name is unique. The latter assigns numbers based
1644 on the order in which they're scanned, which may not be as reliable but
1645 should work when a volume is unnamed.
1646
1647 - Fixed bug in 0.2.5 that caused failure of Linux initial RAM disk
1648 mapping on some (but not all) systems. Affected computers include at
1649 least some Intel motherboards, maybe others.
1650
1651 0.2.5 (4/9/2012):
1652 -----------------
1653
1654 - Fixed bug that caused an inability to associate initial RAM disks with
1655 Linux kernels stored in a volume's root directory.
1656
1657 - Volume badges (that override default badges) are now stored in
1658 .VolumeBadge.icns. Although undocumented, rEFInd formerly loaded custom
1659 volume badges from .VolumeIcon.icns. This carryover from rEFIt was a
1660 confusing name, given the next (new) feature, so I've changed and
1661 documented the name....
1662
1663 - Added ability to set a default icon for a loader stored in the root
1664 directory of a volume: The icon is stored in .VolumeIcon.icns. This icon
1665 is also used for Mac OS X volumes booted from the standard location.
1666
1667 - Fixed bug that caused icons to drop back to generic icons when rEFInd
1668 was launched in certain ways (such as from an EFI shell in rEFInd's
1669 directory) on certain systems.
1670
1671 - Fixed bug that caused "unknown disable flag" to be shown (very briefly)
1672 instead of "unknown hideui flag" when an improper hideui flag was set.
1673
1674 0.2.4 (4/5/2012):
1675 -----------------
1676
1677 - Created new refind.conf entry: "showtools". This entry takes options of
1678 "shell", "gptsync", "about", "exit", "reboot", and "shutdown". This
1679 option is in some respects an affirmative version of portions of the old
1680 "disable" and "hideui" options; however, it enables users to specify the
1681 order in which these options appear on the screen. Also, the "exit"
1682 option is new; it terminates the program. The effect is usually to return
1683 to whatever tool launched it or to launch a default OS; however, this is
1684 somewhat unpredictable. The default therefore omits the "exit" option, as
1685 well as "gptsync", which has always been dangerous (but necessary on most
1686 MacOS/Windows dual-boot setups on Macs). As part of this reconfiguration,
1687 I've eliminated the "rescue Linux" option, which always seemed pointless
1688 to me.
1689
1690 - Folded "disable" and "hideui" refind.conf entries into one ("disable"),
1691 and reduced the number of options to six: "banner", "label",
1692 "singleuser", "hwtest", "arrows", and "all". ("arrows" is new and
1693 disables the scroll arrows when a system has too many tags to display
1694 simultaneously.)
1695
1696 - Added max_tags option to the refind.conf file, enabling users to reduce
1697 the maximum number of OS loader tags that can be displayed at once.
1698
1699 - Updated rEFIt icon, based on the 128x128 volume label from the rEFIt CD
1700 image.
1701
1702 - Added x86 and x86-64 EFI shells to the CD image version of the binary,
1703 but NOT to the binary zip file. The logic is that the CD image is more
1704 likely to be used directly as an emergency disc and so may need this
1705 feature, even though the source isn't part of the rEFInd project. (The
1706 source is readily available from the TianoCore project.)
1707
1708 - EFI shells may now be stored at /shellx64.efi for x86-64 systems or at
1709 /shellia32.efi for x86 systems. The /EFI/tools/shell.efi name is also
1710 recognized; however, if both files are present, two EFI shell icons will
1711 appear on the main menu. The /efi/{refind-path/apps/shell.efi filename,
1712 which was never officially documented but worked as a carryover from
1713 rEFIt, is no longer valid.
1714
1715 0.2.3 (3/26/2012):
1716 ------------------
1717
1718 - Fixed (maybe) a bug that caused hangs when launching a second program
1719 after returning from a first. There are some weird system-to-system
1720 differences, though, and this fix causes (apparently harmless) error
1721 messages about "(re)opening our installation volume" on at least one
1722 system (a 32-bit Mac Mini). I'm committing this change because, imperfect
1723 though it is, it's preferable to the earlier version, at least on my
1724 small sample of computers.
1725
1726 - Because of news that the Linux kernel developers are planning to use the
1727 filename linux.conf to hold Linux kernel configuration data for EFI
1728 booting, I'm transitioning rEFInd away from that name and to
1729 refind_linux.conf to avoid a conflict. This version can use either name,
1730 with refind_linux.conf taking precedence if both are present.
1731
1732 - Added logo for Arch Linux.
1733
1734 0.2.2 (3/23/2012):
1735 ------------------
1736
1737 - Fixed bug that caused program failure when Linux kernels with EFI stub
1738 support were detected with no associated version numbers. rEFInd now
1739 permits automatic linking of *ONE* versionless kernel to *ONE*
1740 versionless initrd file.
1741
1742 - Fixed bug that caused program hangs when a boot loader filename or label
1743 was too long. Such names are now properly truncated and program execution
1744 continues.
1745
1746 - Fixed bug that caused no text to appear in submenus on UEFI systems with
1747 small screens (800x600). NOTE: Problem still occurs on screens smaller
1748 than this, but such systems are very rare.
1749
1750 0.2.1 (3/19/2012):
1751 ------------------
1752
1753 - Added ability to set a "default_selection" that's a title or a substring
1754 of one -- the name given to a stanza in a "menuentry" or the boot
1755 loader's filename, in most cases, although "Mac OS X", "Windows XP
1756 (XoM)", and "Microsoft EFI boot" are also titles.
1757
1758 - Added support for semi-automatic scans of Linux kernels with EFI stub
1759 loader support. The program auto-detects matching initial RAM disk files
1760 and loads additional options from the "linux.conf" file in the same
1761 directory as the kernel.
1762
1763 - Added support for "submenuentry" keyword and associated sub-stanza
1764 entries in refind.conf file.
1765
1766 - Renamed icons/os_mint.icns to icons/os_linuxmint.icns to match the
1767 filename Linux Mint ACTUALLY uses for its ESP boot loader directory.
1768
1769
1770 0.2.0 (3/14/2012):
1771 ------------------
1772
1773 - Initial public release