There are distros using refind as their default…
That’s the problem. rEFInd, for some reason, cannot find the “initramfs-linux.img” file which should be located in the same directory.
Try verifying the directory’s contents with: ls -a /root/.refind-btrfs/rwsnap_2022-09-12_11-22-30_ID387/boot
EDIT:
I’ve tried it now on my machine and it works just fine. It could have something to do with certain differences between a VM installation versus a bare-metal one. That’s the biggest difference between our two setups.
findmnt -t btrfs output:
/ /dev/nvme0n1p8[/@rw-snapshots/rwsnap_2022-09-13_09-00-13_ID7184] btrfs rw,noatime,compress-force=zstd:2,ssd,space_cache=v2,commit=15,subvolid=7185,subvol=/@rw-snapshots/rwsnap_2022-09-13_09-00-13_ID7184
It’s sort of a catch-22 kind of situation:
- rEFInd has only one maintainer who is also its author (forked it from rEFIt, also one developer) and so very few distros (supposedly, I don’t know of any - perhaps @dalto could expand upon his most recent post?) “trust” it enough to offer it as the default boot manager for UEFI systems
- rEFInd cannot attract more developers, maintainers, testers, etc. because not that many distros even offer it as a package in their repositories
Anyhow, it’s really been a bulletproof piece of software in these three or four years since I’ve been using it. I’ve ditched GRUB almost everywhere, it’s installed solely on an older BIOS laptop that I gave to my mom.
I don’t remember which distros are using refind by default. Nothing I run regularly. Up until recently I was testing 50-100 distros per year. Sometimes I would see refind as the bootloader.
Yeah, it seems to be great as long as it’s running in automatic mode. @dalto @ricklinux that’s the probably the cases where it’s being used as a default. We seem to be having more trouble trying to get it to do complicated things manually, like snapshot detection and booting, which would make it a little harder sell for a distro with a bunch of tinkerers as users…like EOS. 
I’m contemplating going back to grub as my primary, not sure. Not done trying to get this working yet. But it looks like if I want my BTRFS snapshots I’m hanging on to grub. Of course, I was going to keep two bootloaders around anyway, just in case, this is all about which one is going to be the primary right now.
I almost had it working but unfortunately i just don’t understand enough on how to configure it properly.
I’m going to start all over when i have some time and try it on a bare metal install. I nuked this one for now. 
Edit: I did try it on bare metal and I’m still getting the same type of issue. I’m just not sure on how to set certain things in the .conf files to get it right. Or it could be that i just don’t have the manual stanza correct? rEFInd info suggests not using manual stanzas? I’ll just have to leave it for now until i get more knowledge. 
Edit2: I’m still dumb as stump! 
Did you verify the snapshot’s boot directory’s contents with ls (or some other tool, it doesn’t matter)?
You could also try setting this flag to true, creating a new manual snapshot, running refind-btrfs again and selecting exactly that snapshot (should be the latest one) in rEFInd’s boot menu.
If that doesn’t work the last resort is trying to get some guidance from the author himself, here.
No i didn’t i was trying something a little different but I will try to go over it again from the beginning. Maybe I’ll try it in a vm again and check everything over again. There is something I’m just not getting right. I know it’s related to my lack of knowledge with btrfs setup and also some of rEFInd.
After two years of succesfully using my current Arch install a single unsafe shutdown is all it took to corrupt the fileystem. Either that or the drive itself isn’t quite healthy. It started with read-only mounting but as of today it doesn’t mount at all. 
Maybe I’ll be able to recover and/or repair it somehow with a live USB but for now I won’t be able to maintain refind-btrfs, unfortunately.
Perhaps it’s time to get rid of this single point of failure, i.e. me, by introducing at least another contributor.
Good times indeed. 
I feel like a funeral dirge needs to be played here, what a damn shame…
Well it happens and I’m on btrfs also. I don’t think it matters whether it’s ext4 or other. Look at my partial log for smartclt.
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 38 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 10%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 10,206,768 [5.22 TB]
Data Units Written: 19,030,768 [9.74 TB]
Host Read Commands: 120,120,794
Host Write Commands: 103,978,912
Controller Busy Time: 91
Power Cycles: 2,578
Power On Hours: 7,615
Unsafe Shutdowns: 169
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Warning Comp. Temperature Time: 0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time: 0
Error Information (NVMe Log 0x01, 16 of 256 entries)
No Errors Logged
I have had many unsafe shutdowns with all the nonsense i do. Guess I’ve been lucky. 
Yeah, it’s annoying. I tried playing around with check, rescue, scrub, etc. but it didn’t help at all, unfortunately. I suppose it’s time to try something new with a fresh install.
At least I’ll be able to save config files and such - a dotfiles repository would have been nicer but this will have to do this time around. 