Cleaning up unused rEFInd boot entries

[raddaqii]

So, installing Gentoo on my new optane NUC went smoothly, with one exception: I picked UEFI boot. Finishing that bit almost drove me mad, because it mad me feel.. exhilarated and clueless. Still does. Basically I have a working machine, can boot it, but am at a loss when it comes to clean up the UEFI boot config bit.

Because in order to boot I need to navigate my way around a dozen or so entries within that graphical -efibootmgr- rEFInd interface and find the only one working entry in the 2nd hierarchy level under a terribly boring name and manually select it. Each and every time I reboot. Practical workaround: rebuild kernels and reboot much less often. How silly is that.

In an attempt to be conceptually clear, I think I did understand
* efibootmgr is a management tool only, i.e. I can use it to add a boot entry, to, erm, the UEFI firmware, right? And it is not used afterwards and I could in theory delete it when everything is fine some time in the future?
* Sakaki's instructions are exceptionally clear, but on this machine I didn't use them (discovered them afterwards really)
* rEFInd UI shows a configuration (boot entries) I just did not find yet, nor does the wiki entry help me
* the Intel UEFI ("BIOS") GUI shows me nothing of the stuff I want to change by way of this post

So this is what I see when I try to diagnose things:

[DONAHUE]

rEFInd leaves kernel install and removal to the user.
You need to mount every partition on your computer run find / -name *vmlinuz* to locate all those kernels and then get to work with rm to remove the extras.
When you have only one kernel remaining rEFInd will find and show only one kernel icon and pressing insert with that icon selected will list only one kernel version with 2 modes.
Default rEFInd settings are described at /EFI/refind/refind.conf-sample on your ESP.
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Defund the FCC.

[saboya]

You have to configure rEFInd correctly. Mount the ESP partition and edit the config manually. Remove autodiscover (or whatever the name of the feature is) and explicitly set the menu entries you'd like listed.

[DONAHUE]

Disagree. The problem is not that rEFInd finds all the kernels installed. That is the greatness of rEFInd. The problem is not removing the cruft. There may be a crowd of configs and system maps laying around also.
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Defund the FCC.

[charles17]

[bammbamm808]

I set;

scan_all_linux_kernels "false"

in refind.conf. It is trivial to add the extension to newly compliled and installed kernels and that way instead of automatically displaying an option for every kernel it finds, you can choose which it will present to you on boot with a very quick 'mv' command.
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MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk
Ryzen 3900x
32Gb Samsung B-die (16GB dual rank x2) DDR4 @ 3200MHz, cl14
Geforce RTX 2070S 8GB
Samsung m.2 NVME pcie-3.0
Etc....

[raddaqii]

Thank you for the replies. Btw, typing up the above was an exercise in thougt and incentive to read the docs again.

[P.Kosunen]

[charles17]