<p class="subhead">by Roderick W. Smith, <a
href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
-<p>Last Web page update: 9/13/2015</p>
+<p>Last Web page update: 9/19/2015</p>
<p>This Web page is provided free of charge and with no annoying outside ads; however, I did take time to prepare it, and Web hosting does cost money. If you find this Web page useful, please consider making a small donation to help keep this site up and running. Thanks!</p>
<ul>
+<li><b>0.9.2 (9/19/2015)</b>—Soon after releasing 0.9.1, I started receiving bug reports about problems with it and Shim 0.8. (See <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/2c248b11/?limit=25#1324">this thread</a> for one such report.) It turns out that the problem was not a new bug in rEFInd, but rather a change from Shim 0.7 to Shim 0.8 that made it next to useless with rEFInd. Specifically, Shim 0.8 now de-registers itself from the EFI after a follow-on program launches another one. This is done to avoid problems in a boot path in which Shim launches <tt>fallback.efi</tt>, which in turn launches <i>another</i> Shim. This creates a new problem, though: rEFInd can validate just one binary before it's "cut off" from Shim. Since rEFInd's drivers are binaries, if you use a single driver, that means that you won't be able to launch anything that requires validation via Shim. I quickly discovered a workaround, which I've implemented in this release. I consider this a "band-aid" patch, though, because it relies on a quirk of Shim's logic to bypass its de-registration. As such, the workaround in this release may break with a future Shim. A true fix will take longer to develop. I want to release this workaround version to head off further problems in the near term, though. This version also introduces a new feature, which is also Shim-related: Since version 0.7, Shim has supported launching binaries other than <tt>grubx64.efi</tt> by passing them on the command line. (Actually, Shim 0.4 supported this, but it required a broken path specification.) I've added support for this feature to <tt>install.sh</tt>: Adding the <tt>--keepname</tt> option to install.sh causes the script to preserve rEFInd's regular filename and to register the approprirate follow-on parameters to have Shim launch rEFInd by that name. This works, but is likely to be more delicate than using the default Shim follow-on name of <tt>grubx64.efi</tt>. The advantage, of course, is that rEFInd needn't "lie" about its name, which makes for less confusion in filenames. For the moment, the RPM and Debian packages I build do <i>not</i> use this new naming feature, since I can't be sure what version of Shim might be picked up. These changes do not affect users who do not use Secure Boot.</li>
+
<li><b>0.9.1 (9/13/2015)</b>—This version has improved the Discoverable Partitions Specification (DPS) support in a number of ways that should make it more reliable when <tt>/etc/fstab</tt> omits references to the root (<tt>/</tt>) partition or when the GPT read-only or do-not-automount options are used to control these features. A stray DPS-related debugging print command has also been removed. I've improved rEFInd's ability to guess the Linux distribution by having it examine <tt>/etc/lsb-release</tt> as well as <tt>/etc/os_release</tt>, and I've added an icon for Elementary OS. Finally, I've made improvements to rEFInd's handling of case-insensitive string comparisons, which were buggy on some EFIs, particularly when rEFInd was compiled with GNU-EFI. rEFInd is still at the mercy of the EFI and support libraries, but many problem cases should now be resolved.</li>
<li><b>0.9.0 (7/26/2015</b>—This version gets a bump up to 0.9.0 mainly because of a highly user-visible new feature: <i>kernel folding.</i> With kernel folding active, multiple Linux kernels in a single directory appear as just one main-menu entry, which launches the most recent kernel (by file timestamp) by default. Older kernels appear on the first one's submenu (accessed by hitting F2 or Insert). You can disable this new feature by setting <tt>fold_linux_kernels false</tt> in <tt>refind.conf</tt>. Another new feature is support for the <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/DiscoverablePartitionsSpec/">Discoverable Partitions Spec,</a> which enables rEFInd to locate the Linux root (<tt>/</tt>) partition without a <tt>refind_linux.conf</tt> or <tt>/etc/fstab</tt> entry. I know of no distribution that automatically sets up its partitions in this way, but if and when this starts to happen, rEFInd will be ready. Other changes are relatively minor: The Debian <tt>postinst</tt> script now calls <tt>install.sh</tt> with <tt>--localkeys</tt> if <tt>sbsign</tt> and <tt>openssl</tt> are available, which helps if using the Ubuntu PPA on a system with custom Secure Boot keys; I've fixed a packaging bug that prevented IA32 versions of filesystem drivers and <tt>gptsync</tt> to not be built in the PPA; <tt>mkrlconf.sh</tt> now refuses to run under OS X; rEFInd now skips checking for BIOS-mode boot code on UEFI-based PCs, which should speed it up a little; I've fixed a bug that caused rEFInd to crash if it found an existing but empty <tt>refind_linux.conf</tt> file; I've made minor code changes to enable rEFInd to build under GCC 5.1; and I've added a new icon for Kali Linux (provided by Francesco D'Eugenio).</li>