OS selection screen skips whenever I restart the PC from Ubuntu.

[cfviotti]

Hello, Rod and everyone!
I'm having this strange issue after installing rEFInd. It works just fine if my computer is turned off. I turn it on and rEFInd OS selection screen appears normally. Though if I boot into Ubuntu (actually, grubx64.efi, then selecting Ubuntu) via rEFInd, and then set the OS to restart, after rEFInd loads, it simply skips the OS screen and auto-selects Ubuntu. I can briefly see the rEFInd selection screen flashing and then the black screen saying it is loading grubx64.efi. GRUB then loads up. It almost looks like as if the time for the OS auto selection is set to 0.

This won't happen though if I schedule a restart from Windows, just Ubuntu.

I've installed it via .deb package (refind_0.7.5-1_amd64.deb), on a Lenovo u410 laptop with secure-boot disabled. My OSes are Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 13.10, both EFI.
Should there be any other useful info that I may provide?

Thank you!

[cfviotti]

Anyone? I haven't seen this issue being reported anywhere else. Im not sure what to do. Basically rEFInd auto-boot directly into Ubuntu if I reboot the system from Ubuntu.

[Roderick W. Smith]

This sounds to me like the firmware may not be properly clearing the keyboard buffer and is somehow registering a keypress (an Enter or Space key) so that the default entry is booting when rEFInd starts up. Check the computer manufacturer for a firmware ("BIOS") update; that might fix the problem.

You might also try setting the scan_delay option in refind.conf. That causes rEFInd to re-scan for boot loaders, but it also re-does some other tasks that might cause rEFInd to better clear the keyboard buffer.

Another possibility might be to play with the kernel's reboot= options, which you'd pass to the kernel via GRUB or via /boot/refind_linux.conf. See here for information on these options. (Search for reboot=.) It's possible that setting the "right" option might bypass this problem, but you'll need to experiment to see if one of these options helps. For that matter, it's conceivable that switching your boot loader (from GRUB to the EFI stub loader, ELILO, or something else) might bypass the problem, although this last seems like a long shot to me.

[cfviotti]

Thank you very much for your answer, Rod! And sorry for the late reply, I was on my desktop these last days.
Anyway, I'm not sure if it could be something like keyboard buffer, since my default OS entry is actually Windows 8, and not Ubuntu. It would be a strange behaviour the system send first a right-arrow keypress to hover over Ubuntu and then send any other keypresses to select it. And if this were to be a BIOS issue, wouldn't it be true that the system would skip rEFInd after a reboot issued from any OS? Because again, this unfortunately only happens when rebooting from Ubuntu.

I've also tried all the kernel's reboot options, in which none of them worked except for a triple fault (which is kinda brute, would it actually be ok to use it frequently?), but it only worked on the first issued reboot after passing it via GRUB. Then for some reason all successive reboot attemps simply hang on the OS.

I'm really lost, not sure what could it be. What bugs me more is that this won't happen if rebooting from Windows 8. Such a strange behaviour :(

[Roderick W. Smith]

This is indeed very puzzling. What happens if you shut down from Ubuntu and then start up again? Do you get the same behavior, or does rEFInd appear and work normally?

rEFInd's default OS and timeout values are handled by reading the values from refind.conf, so the sort of behavior you describe (where the rEFInd screen appears briefly and then disappears) is hard to explain from a rEFInd perspective unless those values were being adjusted -- and Ubuntu doesn't have any sort of rEFInd support!

Another possibility is that the rEFInd display is a red herring -- perhaps it's left over in a video buffer from the previous boot and that buffer is being displayed briefly before being cleared. In this case, it could be that Ubuntu is setting the EFI BootNext parameter when you select the reboot option. I've never heard of this happening, though, and I've never run into it myself. You can check the current state of the parameter with efibootmgr -- tun that as root (or using sudo) and look for the BootNext line. Of course, if the shutdown or reboot command (or a GUI equivalent) is setting this value, it might not show up before then. You might try different ways of rebooting (GUI, the reboot command, the shutdown -r now command, etc.) to see if they differ. That will at least be more data to feed into the diagnosis.