Possible feature request - boot to last chosen OS

[Vincent Valenti]

Hi Roderick,

First let me say that rEFInd is an amazing little program - I've been telling all of my sysadmin coworkers about it's usefulness, and it's been a vital addition to my Mac Mini.

I do have one question/request that I imagine others would find useful as well, if it's possible. Can there be a setting in rEFInd to boot to the last chosen OS by default? This would aid in remote/unattended reboots greatly. So say I selected Windows manually, then I'm RDP'ed in and rebooted...if there is no user interaction, it would boot back into Windows. But if I happen to manually choose OS X and logged in remotely one day and needed to trigger a reboot, it will boot into OS X. That way we wouldn't have to worry that a reboot or power interruption would cause the PC/Mac to change OS if we forget to change the default boot loader in the conf.

I realize that in order to do this rEFInd would basically have to write a small status file to the ESP of which OS is about to boot, then if there is no user interaction on the next boot within the specified timeout, rEFInd (if configured to do so) would boot to the OS that's specified in that file, overriding the default specified in the conf file.

Can such a thing be done?

Thanks in advance!

[Roderick W. Smith]

This feature is on my to-do list. It would probably be better to do it by writing the last-booted entry to NVRAM rather than using a file, since some installations (particularly on Macs) place rEFInd and its configuration file on a read-only filesystem.