rEFInd don't load when rebooting from Linux Mint

[Marco Palena]

Hi,

I'm using rEFInd to dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint 16. Everything works just fine, aside from a minor quirk that shows up when rebooting from Linux Mint: after the manufacturer splash screen, rEFInd is not loaded and the system hangs indefinitely. This doesn't happen on a cold boot or when rebooting from Windows 7.

I'm using rEFInd 0.7.7-1, which I've built from scratch (using GNU-EFI) and installed through install.sh. I've also tried a fresh install using the binaries from the Debian package, but the problem shows up either ways.

I'm working on a brand new, 64-bit Dell XPS 15 9530 (you can find the specs HERE). The firmware version I'm using is A02, which is the latest available from Dell website. Here is an extract of the output of dmidecode:

BIOS Information
    Vendor: Dell Inc.
    Version: A02
    Release Date: 12/18/2013
    Address: 0xF0000
    Runtime Size: 64 kB
    ROM Size: 2048 kB
    Characteristics:
            MCA is supported
            PCI is supported
            BIOS is upgradeable
            BIOS shadowing is allowed
            ESCD support is available
            Boot from CD is supported
            Selectable boot is supported
            BIOS ROM is socketed
            EDD is supported
            5.25"/1.2 MB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
            3.5"/720 kB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
            3.5"/2.88 MB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
            Print screen service is supported (int 5h)
            8042 keyboard services are supported (int 9h)
            Serial services are supported (int 14h)
            Printer services are supported (int 17h)
            CGA/mono video services are supported (int 10h)
            ACPI is supported
            USB legacy is supported
            ATAPI Zip drive boot is supported
            BIOS boot specification is supported
            Targeted content distribution is supported
            UEFI is supported
    BIOS Revision: 0.2
    Firmware Revision: 0.2

Here is my current partition layout:

Partition	Description	Mount Point	File System	Size	Label
/dev/sda1	ESP	/boot/efi	FAT32	100 MB
/dev/sda2	MSR			128 MB
/dev/sda3	Windows 7		NTFS	270 GB	WINDOWS
/dev/sda4	Data	/media/marco/dati	NTFS	500 GB	DATI
/dev/sda5	Linux Mint 16 Root	/	ext4	38 GB	ROOT
/dev/sda6	Linux Mint 16 Home	/home	ext4	108 GB
/dev/sda7	Swap		linux-swap	16 GB

In rEFInd settings, I'm using dont_scan_dirs to exclude the loaders in /EFI/Boot/ (which contains bootx64.efi), /EFI/Microsoft/Boot (which contains bootmgfw.efi, bootmgr.efi and memtest.efi) and /EFI/ubuntu (which contains GRUB). Also I've disabled scan_all_linux_kernels.

I'm populating rEFInd menu entries directly using the following two OS stanzas:

    menuentry "Linux Mint 16"{
            icon /EFI/refind/minimal-theme/icons/os_linuxmint_custom.png
            volume ROOT
            loader /boot/vmlinuz-3.11.0-12-generic
            initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.11.0-12-generic
            options "ro root=UUID=0e1215e4-2198-47c8-9584-f1700a0cc456 quiet splash "
            ostype Linux
    }

    menuentry "Windows 7" {
            icon /EFI/refind/minimal-theme/icons/os_win_custom.png
            loader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
            ostype Windows
    }

So, I'm using the kernel EFI stub loader to load Linux Mint and the Windows loader to load Windows 7.

Googling around I've found that there is a reboot parameter that can be passed to the Linux kernel to specify it's behaviour on reboot. I've added "reboot=value" to the options definition of the Linux stanza, experimenting different values, unfortunately to no avail. Here are some of the values I've tried:

• reboot=acpi,warm


• reboot=acpi,cold


• reboot=force


• reboot=cold


• reboot=warm


• reboot=efi,warm


• reboot=efi,cold (this made the system hang on a black screen before showing up the manufacturer splash screen)


• reboot=efi,cold,force (this resulted in an error: Unable to handle kernel paging request, with Code: Bad RIP value)


• reboot=efi,warm,force


• reboot=acpi,cold,force


• reboot=acpi,warm,force

Neither of these were able to make rEFInd load properly on reboot. What can be the problem here?

Thanks for the help!

Marco Palena

[Roderick W. Smith]

This is almost certainly a firmware bug, although it could be that the Linux kernel is doing something strange on shutdown/reboot that's triggering the bug. To that end, your experiments with the reboot= kernel options might be worth continuing, if you've omitted any values; but you've tried enough that I'm doubtful anything else will work.

You could also try installing a copy of rEFInd as EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi on the ESP, in case the problem is that the firmware is ignoring the NVRAM entries; such a problem might be fixed by having something available in the fallback location.

Another thing to try is to experiment with the BootNext EFI option, which you can set via the efibootmgr -n option. If you explicitly set that to rEFInd, it might do the right thing. If this works, you could incorporate such a call into a system startup script to ensure it's set correctly.