Running refind-install directly would produce more output, which might be helpful; however, I'm 80% sure that this is a result of EFI architecture limitations. Specifically, tools like efibootmgr, upon which the refind-install script (and hence the package installation procedure) depends, work for like architectures only. That is, I would not expect efibootmgr in a 32-bit chroot environment on a 64-bit platform to work. If efibootmgr is installed but doesn't work, then refind-install will fail.
Although it would be possible to modify refind-install to work around this limitation, I'm not sure that doing so would be advisable. For context, be aware that refind-install WILL work in a BIOS boot mode, in which efibootmgr also does not work; however, rEFInd will not actually be fully installed in this case. The files will be installed to the ESP using the fallback filename (EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi), but the EFI NVRAM entries won't be set. This is desirable because there are situations in which you might need to install rEFInd from a BIOS-mode boot -- for instance, if you accidentally installed your OS in BIOS mode rather than in EFI mode. In this case, installing rEFInd to the ESP and then relying on the fallback boot loader filename to boot may work, depending on what else is installed; and even if something else takes precedence, there may be ways to override that or adjust the default in the non-Linux OS. OTOH, I don't see what the point of installing rEFInd from within a 32-bit (i386/IA32/x86) chroot on a 64-bit (AMD64/X64/x86-64) installation would be. By definition, a 64-bit environment is available on the computer, and a non-chroot environment is likely to be better for handling low-level hardware configuration in any event, so why not use it? If you can present a reasonable use case for why installing rEFInd in a chroot environment rather than in the host environment is desirable, then I'll consider adjusting refind-install to handle this situation. Of course, this assumes that my assumption about the cause is correct, too; it could be that something else is going wrong. Even if that's the case, though, the question of why you'd want to install a low-level firmware-interfacing tool from within a chroot environment -- especially one that doesn't match the EFI's bit depth. -- Rod Smith rodsm...@rodsbooks.com
