Roderick W. Smith - 2012-06-22

I've just released version 0.4.3 of rEFInd; see the project revisions page for details. I wanted to point out that I've added support for building the main program with the TianoCore EDK2, in addition to the GNU-EFI toolkit that I've used for all previous versions of the program. (The drivers have used TianoCore EDK2 since their inclusion in version 0.4.0.) My main motivation for adding this support is the possibility that features in the EDK2 will be useful in implementing support for launching BIOS-based OSes on UEFI-based PCs. Currently this only works on Macs, and I've been unsuccessful in getting it to work on PCs, despite several attempts. Some EDK2 calls seem to be designed for this purpose, though, so I've added TianoCore EDK2 support as a first step to trying this approach. I prefer to stick with GNU-EFI because it's better supported on Linux and by Linux distributions, but if the TianoCore EDK2 enables adding features that GNU-EFI won't provide, then I may start using the TianoCore EDK2 to build my primary binary releases in the future. If so, I'll try to keep GNU-EFI support, albeit with fewer features. At the moment, though, the features are identical when built either way.

There may be some subtle differences between the toolkits in terms of bugs or interactions with different EFI implementations. Therefore, for the current version, I've provided two binary packages on the downloads page, one built with GNU-EFI and one built with TianoCore EDK2. I encourage anybody who's interested to try them both and tell me how they work, especially if either version offers any advantage or disadvantage over the other. That's the sort of information that will guide my decision about which toolkit to use to build future binaries. (For the record, I know of two differences: In text mode, the TianoCore EDK2 version aligns menu entries to the right rather than the left; and the 32-bit versions have different glitches in handling volume names.) Thanks!