Developer(s) | Roderick W. Smith |
---|---|
Initial release | 14 March 2012 |
Stable release | |
Repository | |
Written in | C |
Operating system | Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, TrueOS |
Platform | IA-32, x86-64, AArch64 |
Size | ~ 4 MiB |
Available in | English |
Type | UEFI boot manager |
License | GPL-3.0-or-later, BSD-3-Clause (original program), additional components released under various licenses |
Website | www |
rEFInd is a boot manager for UEFI and EFI-based machines. [2] [3] It can be used to boot multiple operating systems that are installed on a single non-volatile device. It also provides a way to launch UEFI applications. [4] [5]
It was forked from discontinued rEFIt in 2012, with 0.2.0 as its first release. [6] [7]
rEFInd has several features: [8]
rEFInd is the default Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot manager for TrueOS.
rEFInd is included in official repositories of major Linux distributions. [10] [11] [12] [13]
GNU-EFI and TianoCore are supported as main development platforms for writing binary UEFI applications in C to launch right from the rEFInd GUI menu. Typical purposes of an EFI application are fixing boot problems and programmatically modifying settings within UEFI environment, which would otherwise be performed from within the BIOS of a personal computer (PC) without UEFI. [8]
rEFInd can be built with either GNU-EFI or TianoCore EDK2/UDK. [14]
RefindPlus is a fork of rEFInd that add several features and improvements for Mac devices, specifically MacPro3,1 and MacPro5,1, and equivalent Xserve. [15]
A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and often a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.
GNU GRUB is a boot loader package from the GNU Project. GRUB is the reference implementation of the Free Software Foundation's Multiboot Specification, which provides a user the choice to boot one of multiple operating systems installed on a computer or select a specific kernel configuration available on a particular operating system's partitions.
Tenés Empanadas Graciela is a turn-based strategy game distributed by several popular Linux distributions. The idea for this free and open-source software program came from the board game TEG, which itself is based on the popular Risk game but differs in many aspects of the rules.
A light-weight Linux distribution is one that uses lower memory and/or has less processor-speed requirements than a more "feature-rich" Linux distribution. The lower demands on hardware ideally result in a more responsive machine, and/or allow devices with fewer system resources to be used productively. The lower memory and/or processor-speed requirements are achieved by avoiding software bloat, i.e. by leaving out features that are perceived to have little or no practical use or advantage, or for which there is no or low demand.
MemTest86 and Memtest86+ are memory test software programs designed to test and stress test an x86 architecture computer's random-access memory (RAM) for errors, by writing test patterns to most memory addresses, reading back the data, and comparing for errors. Each tries to verify that the RAM will accept and correctly retain arbitrary patterns of data written to it, that there are no errors where different bits of memory interact, and that there are no conflicts between memory addresses.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface is a specification that defines the architecture of the platform firmware used for booting the computer hardware and its interface for interaction with the operating system. Examples of firmware that implement the specification are AMI Aptio, Phoenix SecureCore, TianoCore EDK II, InsydeH2O. UEFI replaces the BIOS which was present in the boot ROM of all personal computers that are IBM PC compatible, although it can provide backwards compatibility with the BIOS using CSM booting. Intel developed the original Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) specification. Some of the EFI's practices and data formats mirror those of Microsoft Windows. In 2005, UEFI deprecated EFI 1.10.
phpLDAPadmin is a web app for administering Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers. It's written in the PHP programming language, and is licensed under the GNU General Public License. The application is available in 14 languages and supports UTF-8 encoded directory strings.
Technical variations of Linux distributions include support for different hardware devices and systems or software package configurations. Organizational differences may be motivated by historical reasons. Other criteria include security, including how quickly security upgrades are available; ease of package management; and number of packages available.
The GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a standard for the layout of partition tables of a physical computer storage device, such as a hard disk drive or solid-state drive, using universally unique identifiers, which are also known as globally unique identifiers (GUIDs). Forming a part of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard, it is nevertheless also used for some BIOSs, because of the limitations of master boot record (MBR) partition tables, which use 32 bits for logical block addressing (LBA) of traditional 512-byte disk sectors.
The EFIsystem partition or ESP is a partition on a data storage device that is used by computers that have the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). When a computer is booted, UEFI firmware loads files stored on the ESP to start operating systems and various utilities.
HomeBank is a personal accounting software package that runs on OpenBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, macOS and AmigaOS. Released under version 2 or later of the GNU General Public License, HomeBank is free software. HomeBank can be found in the software repositories of Linux distributions such as Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, Gentoo Linux, Arch Linux and Ubuntu.
Wubi is a free software Ubuntu installer, that was the official Windows-based software, from 2008 until 2013, to install Ubuntu from within Windows, to a single file within an existing Windows partition.
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of available bootloaders.
WeeChat is a free and open-source Internet Relay Chat client that is designed to be light and fast. It is released under the terms of the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later and has been developed since 2003.
rEFIt is a boot menu and maintenance toolkit for EFI-based machines like the Intel Macs. It can be used to boot multiple operating systems, including triple-boot setups with software such as Apple's Boot Camp Assistant. It also provides a way to enter and explore the EFI pre-boot environment. The name "rEFIt" is likely a play on the terms "refit" and "EFI".
KVIrc is a graphical IRC client for Linux, Unix, Mac OS and Windows. The name is an acronym of K Visual IRC in which the K stands for a dependency to KDE, which became optional from version 2.0.0. The software is based on the Qt framework and its code is released under a modified GNU General Public License.
systemd-boot is a free and open-source boot manager created by obsoleting the gummiboot project and merging it into systemd in May 2015.
TianoCore EDK II is the reference implementation of UEFI by Intel. EDK is the abbreviation for EFI Development Kit and is developed by the TianoCore community. TianoCore EDK II is the de facto standard generic UEFI services implementation.
The Linux kernel can run on a variety of devices made by Apple, including devices where the unlocking of the bootloader is not possible with an official procedure, such as iPhones and iPads.