]> code.delx.au - refind/blob - docs/refind/todo.html
Fix memory management error; version 0.6.4 release.
[refind] / docs / refind / todo.html
1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
2 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
3 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
4
5 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
6 <head>
7 <title>The rEFInd Boot Manager: The Future of rEFInd</title>
8 <link href="../Styles/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
9 </head>
10
11 <body>
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 1/8/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.4</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>
22
23 <table border="1">
24 <tr>
25 <td>Donate $1.00</td>
26 <td>Donate $2.50</td>
27 <td>Donate $5.00</td>
28 <td>Donate $10.00</td>
29 <td>Donate another value</td>
30 </tr>
31 <tr>
32 <td><form name="_xclick" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
33 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
34 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
35 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
36 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
37 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="1.00">
38 <input type="image" src="http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
39 </form>
40
41 </td>
42 <td><form name="_xclick" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
43 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
44 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
45 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
46 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
47 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="2.50">
48 <input type="image" src="http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
49 </form>
50
51 </td>
52 <td><form name="_xclick" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
53 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
54 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
55 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
56 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
57 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="5.00">
58 <input type="image" src="http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
59 </form>
60
61 </td>
62 <td><form name="_xclick" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
63 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
64 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
65 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
66 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
67 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="10.00">
68 <input type="image" src="http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
69 </form>
70
71 </td>
72 <td>
73 <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
74 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations">
75 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
76 <input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">
77 <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="0">
78 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
79 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
80 <input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF:btn_donate_LG.gif:NonHostedGuest">
81 <input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
82 <img alt="Donate with PayPal" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
83 </form>
84 </td></tr>
85 </table>
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>The code could be more flexible in its handling of the sizes of
149 various graphical elements, and particularly drawn text. Prior to
150 version 0.2.2, submenu text was invisible on UEFI-based PCs with
151 800x600 and smaller displays because of an inability to properly
152 crop the graphics fields that hold the text. With version 0.2.2,
153 I've put a band-aid on this problem by reducing the field size so
154 that it now works on 800x600 displays, but smaller displays still
155 suffer from this problem. This is just an example of the
156 inflexibility of certain layout issues within rEFInd.</li>
157
158 <li>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple
159 image sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file,
160 rEFInd can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the
161 desired size would be useful.</li>
162
163 <li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot
164 loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID
165 from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's
166 label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
167
168 <li>Currently, if a filesystem's label comes up empty, rEFInd
169 substitutes the size, so you get displays like <tt>boot
170 EFI\foo\bar.efi from 90 GiB volume</tt>. I'd like to add more
171 checks to substitute the GPT <i>partition</i> label if the
172 <i>filesystem</i> label comes up empty, or add a filesystem type
173 identifier to the size.</li>
174
175 <li>The default_selection option in refind.conf could be improved by
176 supporting a list of default options, so that if the first item
177 isn't found, rEFInd will try to boot the second one in the list,
178 and so on. This could be handy in case a driver fails to load, or
179 to provide an override in case the user inserts a specific
180 removable disk&mdash;by placing the removable disk's name first in
181 the list, it will take precedence over the normal hard disk
182 default.</li>
183
184 <li>Along the lines of the previous item, the default_selection might
185 be expanded to support some form of specification of disk types, as
186 in a special entry for any optical disk or any external disk, no
187 matter what its name is.</li>
188
189 <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
190 and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
191 boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
192
193 </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
194
195 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
196
197 <ul>
198
199 <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
200 Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
201 <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
202 This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
203 Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
204 parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
205 "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
206 firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
207 other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
208 mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
209 problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
210 to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
211 since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
212 EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
213 OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
214 implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
215 let it go.</li>
216
217 <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
218 PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
219 fixed.</li>
220
221 <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
222 UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
223 Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
224 do it.</li>
225
226 <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
227 ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
228 This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
229
230 <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
231 re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
232 nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
233 EFI.</li>
234
235 <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
236 re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
237 have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
238 caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
239 shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
240
241 <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
242 slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
243 in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
244 volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
245 /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
246 and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
247
248 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
249 similar problems.</li>
250
251 </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
252
253 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
254
255 <ul>
256
257 <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
258 it would.</li>
259
260 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
261 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
262 can see how it could be for some people.</li>
263
264 <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
265 whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
266 Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
267 understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
268 installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
269 See <a
270 href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
271 forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
272
273 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
274 boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
275 One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
276 stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
277 boot loader file.</li>
278
279 <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
280 information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
281 disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
282 the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
283 and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
284
285 <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
286 A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
287 requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
288 only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
289 as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
290 written in C.</li>
291
292 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
293 loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
294 change its icon.</li>
295
296 <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
297 purposes.</li>
298
299 <li>Going further, the ability to load arbitrary other fonts, ideally
300 in a standard format, would be desirable for theming purposes.</li>
301
302 <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
303 priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
304 written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
305 can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
306
307 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
308
309 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
310
311 <ul>
312
313 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Given the talk of
314 shifting to Btrfs, that should be the priority; however, other
315 Linux filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
316 additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
317 RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
318
319 <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
320 are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
321 that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
322 the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
323 system that uses <a
324 href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
325 I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.</li>
326
327 <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
328 what the volume's real label is.</li>
329
330 <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
331 to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
332 desirable.</li>
333
334 <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
335 one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
336 <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
337 computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
338 This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
339 since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
340 that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
341
342 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
343
344 </ul>
345
346 <hr />
347
348 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
349
350 <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>
351
352 <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>
353
354 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
355
356 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
357
358 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
359 </body>
360 </html>