When I plug a bootable drive into a computer, it appears in the BIOS/boot options menu, and has a name, such as ‘Windows Boot Manager’ or ‘Fedora’, etc. But I don’t understand where these names come from, and whenever I search about it I only find info about viewing/editing the options in the list, not their source.
To my understanding, the motherboard/BIOS keeps a list in NVRAM of EFI boot options. These can be edited with programs like efibootmgr. But those must be being populated from some data in the EFI partition, right? When I look in there I just see a bunch of .efi executable files, and the names of the folders they’re in also don’t seem to correspond to this.
Is the BIOS actually executing these .efi files somehow to get the name to display for them, without actually triggering the boot process, or is there some header or something in them? Or is there some other hidden place where the names come from?
