Review of Refind boot manager (was Re: USB UEFI recovery stick)

[Joel Roth <joelz@pobox.com>]

On Sun, Jan 23, 2022 at 09:47:10PM -0500, Polyna-Maude Racicot-Summerside wrote:

> rEFInd is a fork of the rEFIt boot manager. Like rEFIt, rEFInd can
> auto-detect your installed EFI boot loaders and it presents a pretty GUI
> menu of boot options. rEFInd goes beyond rEFIt in that rEFInd better
> handles systems with many boot loaders, gives better control over the
> boot loader search process, and provides the ability for users to define
> their own boot loader entries.
> 
> https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html

I just migrated my system to new hardware with a GPT
formatted disk. (Well, almost migrated; I still have to
figure out the driver for the wifi chip.)

There was no reason not to reformat the disk as MBR (it is
only 500GB) but anyway decided to try to use the GPT/EFI
format. 

I repartitioned, leaving only the EFI system partition.
For the bootloader I've been avoiding Grub due to its
complicated config files. (Maybe I'm just contrarian ;-)

lilo seemed to barf. I didn't get beyond the warnings that
there was some partition table error and that I was attempting
something dangerous. 

My next try was Refind, a friendly OS-agnostic bootloader
that handles EFI. (I'd used it once previously when
installing devuan on a Intel Mac.)

The main limitation compared to Grub is that Refind doesn't
let you edit the command line prior to booting. 

Despite lots of detail on the website, the actual
configuration is simple, even compared to lilo.conf.  There
are just three lines in /boot/refind_linux.conf containing
options for normal, single-user mode and minimal boot. The
boot partition(s) are identified by UUID. Refind generates
menu choices for all kernels found.  

Refind comes with several utility scripts. I used
refind-install to generate refind_linux.conf, but needed to
tweak the result for it to correctly find the initrd images
matching the kernel versions.  

So in conclusion, Refind is easy to install and configure,
and suits my purposes just fine. 

> -- 
> Polyna-Maude R.-Summerside
> -Be smart, Be wise, Support opensource development

-- 
Joel Roth