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   7   <title>The rEFInd Boot Manager: The Future of rEFInd</title>
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  12   <h1>The rEFInd Boot Manager:<br />The Future of rEFInd</h1>
  13
  14   <p class="subhead">by Roderick W. Smith, <a
  15 href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
  16
  17 <p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
  18 1/16/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.5</p>
  19
  20
  21 <p>I'm a technical writer and consultant specializing in Linux technologies. This Web page is provided free of charge and with no annoying outside ads; however, I did take time to prepare it, and Web hosting does cost money. If you find this Web page useful, please consider making a small donation to help keep this site up and running. Thanks!</p>
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  86
  87 <hr />
  88
  89 <p>This page is part of the documentation for the rEFInd boot manager. If a Web search has brought you here, you may want to start at the <a href="index.html">main page.</a></p>
  90
  91 <hr />
  92
  93 <p>rEFInd is far from perfect. It's based on rEFIt, which has a <a href="https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=161917&atid=821764">list of active bugs</a> on its project page on Sourceforge. I have not studied this bug list in detail for rEFInd's first release, although I've probably fixed a few of those bugs because I encountered them myself. Other bugs I may never fix because I lack the necessary hardware for testing.</p>
  94
  95 <p>This page exists to document some of rEFInd's known bugs and limitations, as well as features I hope to add in the future. Some of the items on this list are things that you may be able to help with, so if you'd like to contribute, feel free to drop me a line!</p>
  96
  97 <p>The following list groups things that need to be done into broad categories. In some cases, there's some ambiguity about how an item might best be classified. Without further ado, then:</p>
  98
  99 <ul>
 100
 101 <li><b>Tasks with which non-programmers can help:</b>
 102
 103     <ul>
 104
 105     <li>Testing! rEFIt was complex enough that changes such as the ones
 106         I've made have the potential to disrupt the program's operation in
 107         unexpected ways. Since the initial 0.2.0 release, I've continued to
 108         add features to rEFInd, and every new feature is another way for
 109         bugs to get into the program. I can only test on a handful of
 110         systems with a limited number of configurations. Therefore, if you
 111         try rEFInd and run into bugs, please report them to me!</li>
 112
 113     <li>I have little talent with graphics manipulation programs, so
 114         rEFInd's boot logo, such as it is, is pretty weak. If you have
 115         artistic talent and would like to create a rEFInd logo, please feel
 116         free to send it to me. I won't make any final decision about
 117         changes until at least June 30 of 2012.</li>
 118
 119     <li>rEFIt's original design, and hence rEFInd's design, enables easy
 120         theming by replacing icon files. If you'd like to design a new
 121         theme for rEFInd, feel free to submit it. I might or might not
 122         replace the icons it uses now (most of which come from the Oxygen
 123         Icons package), but I may provide links to themes on this Web site
 124         (or even host them on the project's Sourceforge page). For more
 125         information on designing themes for rEFInd, see the <a
 126         href="themes.html">Theming rEFInd</a> page.</li>
 127
 128     </ul></li> <!-- Non-programmer help -->
 129
 130 <li><b>Improvements to existing features:</b>
 131
 132     <ul>
 133
 134     <li>The support for booting legacy (BIOS) OSes on UEFI-based PCs
 135         currently has a number of limitations. Most importantly, it works
 136         off of the list of boot devices stored in the computer's NVRAM. I'd
 137         prefer to have it scan disks and partitions, as the Mac's legacy
 138         boot support does. Also, the UEFI legacy boot code presents empty
 139         optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific
 140         icons.</li>
 141
 142     <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86
 143         or <i>x</i>86-64 systems and displays this information in its
 144         "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
 145         like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
 146         way to test such changes.</li>
 147
 148     <li>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple
 149         image sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file,
 150         rEFInd can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the
 151         desired size would be useful.</li>
 152
 153     <li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot
 154         loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID
 155         from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's
 156         label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
 157
 158     <li>Currently, if a filesystem's label comes up empty, rEFInd
 159         substitutes the size, so you get displays like <tt>boot
 160         EFI\foo\bar.efi from 90 GiB volume</tt>. I'd like to add more
 161         checks to substitute the GPT <i>partition</i> label if the
 162         <i>filesystem</i> label comes up empty.</li>
 163
 164     <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> option in <tt>refind.conf</tt> could
 165         be improved by supporting a list of default options, so that if the
 166         first item isn't found, rEFInd will try to boot the second one in
 167         the list, and so on. This could be handy in case a driver fails to
 168         load, or to provide an override in case the user inserts a specific
 169         removable disk&mdash;by placing the removable disk's name first in
 170         the list, it will take precedence over the normal hard disk
 171         default.</li>
 172
 173     <li>Along the lines of the previous item, the default_selection might
 174         be expanded to support some form of specification of disk types, as
 175         in a special entry for any optical disk or any external disk, no
 176         matter what its name is.</li>
 177
 178     <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
 179         and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
 180         boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
 181
 182     </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
 183
 184 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
 185
 186     <ul>
 187
 188     <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
 189         Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
 190         <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
 191         This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
 192         Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
 193         parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
 194         "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
 195         firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
 196         other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
 197         mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
 198         problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
 199         to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
 200         since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
 201         EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
 202         OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
 203         implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
 204         let it go.</li>
 205
 206     <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
 207         PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
 208         fixed.</li>
 209
 210     <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
 211         UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
 212         Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
 213         do it.</li>
 214
 215     <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
 216         ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
 217         This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
 218
 219     <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
 220         re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
 221         nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
 222         EFI.</li>
 223
 224     <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
 225         re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
 226         have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
 227         caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
 228         shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
 229
 230     <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
 231         slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
 232         in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
 233         volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
 234         /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
 235         and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
 236
 237     <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
 238         similar problems.</li>
 239
 240     </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
 241
 242 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
 243
 244     <ul>
 245
 246     <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
 247         it would.</li>
 248
 249     <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
 250         BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
 251         can see how it could be for some people.</li>
 252
 253     <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
 254         whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
 255         Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
 256         understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
 257         installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
 258         See <a
 259         href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
 260         forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
 261
 262     <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
 263         boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
 264         One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
 265         stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
 266         boot loader file.</li>
 267
 268     <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
 269         information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
 270         disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
 271         the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
 272         and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
 273
 274     <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
 275         A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
 276         requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
 277         only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
 278         as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
 279         written in C.</li>
 280
 281     <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
 282         loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
 283         change its icon.</li>
 284
 285     <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
 286         purposes.</li>
 287
 288     <li>Going further, the ability to load arbitrary other fonts, ideally
 289         in a standard format, would be desirable for theming purposes.</li>
 290
 291     <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
 292         priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
 293         written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
 294         can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
 295
 296     </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
 297
 298 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
 299
 300     <ul>
 301
 302     <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Given the talk of
 303         shifting to Btrfs, that should be the priority; however, other
 304         Linux filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
 305         additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
 306         RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
 307
 308     <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
 309         are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
 310         that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
 311         the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
 312         system that uses <a
 313         href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
 314         I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.</li>
 315
 316     <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
 317         what the volume's real label is.</li>
 318
 319     <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
 320         to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
 321         desirable.</li>
 322
 323     <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
 324         one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
 325         <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
 326         computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
 327         This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
 328         since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
 329         that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
 330
 331     </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
 332
 333 </ul>
 334
 335 <hr />
 336
 337 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 338
 339 <p>This document is licensed under the terms of the <a href="FDL-1.3.txt">GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.3.</a></p>
 340
 341 <p>If you have problems with or comments about this Web page, please e-mail me at <a href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com.</a> Thanks.</p>
 342
 343 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 344
 345 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
 346
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