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Comment by rsyring | Hacker News Reader

I replaced Grub w/ rEFInd a few years ago and I've never looked back. The ability to just scan filesystems and boot images is so simple/easy compared to the Grub menu edit and "reinstall" process you have to go through every time you want to make a change. I've never used systemd-boot but highly recommend rEFInd over Grub.

I also have a Python script for installing Ubuntu on native ZFS w/ encryption and using rEFInd. You can use this script from a live boot environment. If nothing else, can easily review for how to do it manually.

- https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/REFInd

- https://github.com/rsyring/zfs-on-root/blob/master/zor.py

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I concur. Refind is pretty much universal for me: it detects Linux kernels automatically, windows, boots from USB or detect USB (I always have an emergency copy that will boot my systems if I screw up), it also runs on Intel macs...

Also... It is very customizable with good a 100% graphic UI.

systemd-boot is also pretty hands-off. My distro's (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) kernel packages build regular initrd images in package postinstall, but since the postinst script uses dracut I just had to drop a dracut config (`uefi=yes`) in /etc to make it build UKIs in /efi instead. systemd-boot automatically picks up those UKIs.

I just have to remember to delete the UKIs manually when I uninstall the corresponding old kernel package, otherwise the EFI partition would fill up eventually. If my distro ever switches to UKIs by default then the postuninstall script would handle that automatically.

I also switched to REFind because I wanted to boot my various Linux installations from encrypted ZFS pools, but after realizing how much more convenient it was (because it can just boot from whatever bootable OS installation it finds by scanning the disk), now I always use it instead of grub, regardless.

I noted recently that it also sees systemd-boot installations and will boot from those, if desired (in my case it was a fresh installation of Pop OS, which uses systemd-boot by default).

For me, it's unambiguously better (meaning easier, with no extra periodic steps required to maintain my ability to boot whatever bootable thing I want), but I am curious about what scenarios would make one want to use systemd-boot (or grub) instead.

> I am curious about what scenarios would make one want to use systemd-boot (or grub) instead.

I have Linux VMs which boots in ~2s (to ssh login; ~700ms to userspace). I use systemd-boot because it has nicer integration with my distro of choice than bare EFI stub, and it adds very minimal overhead in boot time.

That's pretty impressive, can you share some information about what you're using to achieve that?

My preferred distro is Debian.

Use linux-image-cloud; use a modern hypervisor with no legacy devices (only virtio etc); use tiny-initramfs; mask systemd-networkd-wait-online.service; add cryptomgr.notests noreplace-smp to kernel command line.

I think that's all, and use a moderately fast CPU (i7-8700K which is already 5 years old).

Amazing, thanks for the reply! Debian is my preferred base so I'll give this a try!

When you say modern hypervisor, do you mean, not KVM? How do you get around the UEFI/BIOS post time which is usually a few seconds by itself?

rfoo is saying that their VMs boot in under 2 seconds, not the hypervisor host.

I didn't ask about the Hypervisor host.

I'm talking about the time taken by OMVF/SeaBIOS or whatever equivalent in the VM; which is why I asked about the type of VM/Hypervisor because that might not apply.

I put a bunch of live environment/rescue images (trinity, UBCD, hirens, systemrescue etc) on a usb flash with ventoy, and ventoy couldn’t boot any of them except for systemrescue (seemed like it had an issue with EFI with the other ones)..

As an alternative to ventoy, can I use refind on a usb flash drive with iso images?

Yes. But when I did this I had to modify some things in my Dell's BIOS to get it to run refind from the USB.

More a Dell thing than refined I believe.

Another rEFInd user chiming in, the best bootloader ever. Using it on all my Gentoo and Arch installs. The Fedora installs are still on Grub2 though.

For examples of how amazing rEFInd can look - see https://github.com/hashhar/rEFInd-theme/ and https://github.com/EvanPurkhiser/rEFInd-minimal

I also used to use rEFInd while I was running macOS/windows dualboot for a short time. I am going back to it from grub now since booting from my zfs root partition with grub has become a hassle.

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