I have installed refind 0.11.2 on my macbook pro and I can boot both OSX and my Debian system as well.
However I have few things i'd like to fix.
1 - While getting the refind menu to show up is very quick (one second after the shim I can see the refind menu), if I select the Debian icon I see the screen 'loading Debiain with options "quiet splash initrd=\initrd-blablabla.img"' and it stays like that durign 15 to 20 sec. My Debian system as a separate ext4 partition (converted from ext2 as I thought maybe ext2 was the source of the issue) and refind is installed on the esp (/boot/efi/EFI/refind). Mac OSX system boots without any delay.
2 - I'm not sure exactly when but at some point both OSX icons are booting the same system while I used to be able to boot normal OSX using the first icon and go to recorey using the second one. I think this started after I disabled OSX CoreStorage (which I can't remember why I did it...)
Any hint is welcome, regards.
Last edit: alxgomz 2018-01-27
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I have installed refind on my macbook pro and I can boot both OSX and
my Debian system as well. However I have few things i'd like to fix.
1 - While getting the refind menu to show up is very quick (one
second after the shim I can see the refind menu), if I select the
Debian icon I see the screen 'loading Debiain with options "quiet
splash initrd=\initrd-blablabla.img"' and it stays like that durign
15 to 20 sec. My Debian system as a separate ext4 partition
(converted from ext2 as I thought maybe ext2 was the source of the
issue) and refind is installed on the esp (/boot/efi/EFI/refind). Mac
OSX system boots without any delay.
The problem is almost certainly an interaction of your firmware with the
EFI filesystem driver for ext2/3/4fs. This is a known issue, which used
to be much worse than it is now. It's especially bad with ext2fs, and
unfortunately, converting from ext2fs to ext4fs is unlikely to improve
matters, since the problem relates to filesystem data structures that
won't automatically change just because of an in-place conversion; you'd
need to back up, wipe out the filesystem, create a new filesystem, and
restore everything.
A much easier solution is to shrink the existing partition by a small
amount (I'd recommend 1GiB or thereabouts), create a new partition in
its place, copy the contents of /boot there, edit /etc/fstab to mount
the new partition at /boot, and then begin booting from the new
partition. You can use any filesystem that's supported by the EFI and
whatever drivers you want to add. rEFInd ships with ReiserFS, Btrfs,
ext4fs, and ext2/3fs drivers, with speeds dropping as you go down that
list. Thus, using ReiserFS will likely yield the best speeds; however,
most distributions are backing away from ReiserFS, so you might be
better off with Btrfs or ext4fs. Some filesystems, including both
ReiserFS and Btrfs, have other caveats; see my page on filesystem
drivers for details:
2 - I'm not sure exactly when but at some point both OSX icons are
booting the same system while I used to be able to boot normal OSX
using the first icon and go to recorey using the second one. I think
this started after I disabled OSX CoreStorage (which I can't remember
why I did it...)
The macOS recovery system should be bootable via a second-row icon, if
it's enabled, as it should be by default -- but check your refind.conf
and the showtools line, and be sure that apple_recovery is one of the
options. CoreStorage is Apple's name for their LVM configuration, and
using it changes the way the Mac boots. Thus, disabling it is likely to
shuffle boot loaders a bit; however. Note that the number of possible
configurations of macOS boot setups has been increasing over the years,
so it's become impossible for me to test them all.
Thanks for the hints!
Indeed, ext4 formating from scratch worked and I don't have that delay anymore.
Regarding the OSX recovery, When starting it, I get a white stroke circle on a black background and after a while I get back to refind.
I have tried to load the recovery HD partition using the Mac's boot loader and doing so also starts a normal OSX session...
I now remember when it all started. This is actually after I resized the Macintosh HD volume (which is why I needed to disable CoreStorage) in order to create a new partition. This partition now sits between the Macintosh HD partition and the Recivery HD one... This has changed the order of the partition and seems to bother both refind and the Mac bootloader.
I'll try to set a static menu entry see if it works better...
Thanks
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Same behaviour with a static menuentry (booting to normal OSX).
I managed to have some more error message when trying to boot the Apple recovery (from the showtools menu)
Starting boot.efi
Using load options ''
Recovery Image Verification failed status [0x00blablabla...]
So I guess this is no refind issue but really something I messed up in OSX by disabling the CoreStorage volumes... I'm also guessing the fact it boots normal OSX is some kind of fallback behaviour.
Regards,
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hi,
I have installed refind 0.11.2 on my macbook pro and I can boot both OSX and my Debian system as well.
However I have few things i'd like to fix.
1 - While getting the refind menu to show up is very quick (one second after the shim I can see the refind menu), if I select the Debian icon I see the screen 'loading Debiain with options "quiet splash initrd=\initrd-blablabla.img"' and it stays like that durign 15 to 20 sec. My Debian system as a separate ext4 partition (converted from ext2 as I thought maybe ext2 was the source of the issue) and refind is installed on the esp (/boot/efi/EFI/refind). Mac OSX system boots without any delay.
2 - I'm not sure exactly when but at some point both OSX icons are booting the same system while I used to be able to boot normal OSX using the first icon and go to recorey using the second one. I think this started after I disabled OSX CoreStorage (which I can't remember why I did it...)
Any hint is welcome, regards.
Last edit: alxgomz 2018-01-27
On 01/27/2018 05:25 AM, alxgomz wrote:
The problem is almost certainly an interaction of your firmware with the
EFI filesystem driver for ext2/3/4fs. This is a known issue, which used
to be much worse than it is now. It's especially bad with ext2fs, and
unfortunately, converting from ext2fs to ext4fs is unlikely to improve
matters, since the problem relates to filesystem data structures that
won't automatically change just because of an in-place conversion; you'd
need to back up, wipe out the filesystem, create a new filesystem, and
restore everything.
A much easier solution is to shrink the existing partition by a small
amount (I'd recommend 1GiB or thereabouts), create a new partition in
its place, copy the contents of /boot there, edit /etc/fstab to mount
the new partition at /boot, and then begin booting from the new
partition. You can use any filesystem that's supported by the EFI and
whatever drivers you want to add. rEFInd ships with ReiserFS, Btrfs,
ext4fs, and ext2/3fs drivers, with speeds dropping as you go down that
list. Thus, using ReiserFS will likely yield the best speeds; however,
most distributions are backing away from ReiserFS, so you might be
better off with Btrfs or ext4fs. Some filesystems, including both
ReiserFS and Btrfs, have other caveats; see my page on filesystem
drivers for details:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/drivers.html
The macOS recovery system should be bootable via a second-row icon, if
it's enabled, as it should be by default -- but check your refind.conf
and the showtools line, and be sure that apple_recovery is one of the
options. CoreStorage is Apple's name for their LVM configuration, and
using it changes the way the Mac boots. Thus, disabling it is likely to
shuffle boot loaders a bit; however. Note that the number of possible
configurations of macOS boot setups has been increasing over the years,
so it's become impossible for me to test them all.
--
Rod Smith
rodsmith@rodsbooks.com
http://www.rodsbooks.com
Hi Rod,
Thanks for the hints!
Indeed, ext4 formating from scratch worked and I don't have that delay anymore.
Regarding the OSX recovery, When starting it, I get a white stroke circle on a black background and after a while I get back to refind.
I have tried to load the recovery HD partition using the Mac's boot loader and doing so also starts a normal OSX session...
I now remember when it all started. This is actually after I resized the Macintosh HD volume (which is why I needed to disable CoreStorage) in order to create a new partition. This partition now sits between the Macintosh HD partition and the Recivery HD one... This has changed the order of the partition and seems to bother both refind and the Mac bootloader.
I'll try to set a static menu entry see if it works better...
Thanks
Same behaviour with a static menuentry (booting to normal OSX).
I managed to have some more error message when trying to boot the Apple recovery (from the showtools menu)
Starting boot.efi
Using load options ''
Recovery Image Verification failed status [0x00blablabla...]
So I guess this is no refind issue but really something I messed up in OSX by disabling the CoreStorage volumes... I'm also guessing the fact it boots normal OSX is some kind of fallback behaviour.
Regards,