This paper presents the design of a novel H ∞ -based control framework for state regulation of continuous-time linear systems with completely unknown dynamics. The proposed method solves the regulation problem with the desired convergence rate and simultaneously seeks to attenuate the adverse effect of disturbance on the system. The H ∞ regulation problem assumes a cost function that considers regulation with a guaranteed rate of convergence as well as disturbance attenuation. The problem is then turned into a two-player zero-sum game optimization problem that can be solved by solving the associated algebraic Riccati equation (ARE), which provides a model-based solution. To solve this problem in a model-free way, a novel integral reinforcement learning (IRL) algorithm is designed to learn the solution online without requiring any prior knowledge of the system dynamics. It is shown that the model-free method (i.e., IRL-based method) provides the same solution as the model-based method (i.e., ARE). The effectiveness of the proposed method is ascertained through simulation examples; it is shown that the proposed method effectively addresses the problem for both stable and unstable systems.