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14 <h1>The rEFInd Boot Manager:
<br />The Future of rEFInd
</h1>
16 <p class=
"subhead">by Roderick W. Smith,
<a
17 href=
"mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com
</a></p>
19 <p>Originally written:
3/
14/
2012; last Web page update:
20 7/
26/
2015, referencing rEFInd
0.9.0</p>
23 <p>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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129 <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>
133 <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>
135 <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>
137 <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>
141 <li><b>Tasks with which non-programmers can help:
</b>
145 <li>Testing! rEFIt was complex enough that changes such as the ones
146 I've made have the potential to disrupt the program's operation in
147 unexpected ways. Since the initial
0.2.0 release, I've continued to
148 add features to rEFInd, and every new feature is another way for
149 bugs to get into the program. I can only test on a handful of
150 systems with a limited number of configurations. Therefore, if you
151 try rEFInd and run into bugs, please report them to me!
</li>
153 <li>rEFIt's original design, and hence rEFInd's design, enables easy
154 theming by replacing icon files. If you'd like to design a new
155 theme for rEFInd, feel free to submit it. I might or might not
156 replace the icons it uses now (most of which come from the Oxygen
157 Icons package), but I may provide links to themes on this Web site
158 (or even host them on the project's Sourceforge page). For more
159 information on designing themes for rEFInd, see the
<a
160 href=
"themes.html">Theming rEFInd
</a> page.
</li>
162 </ul></li> <!-- Non-programmer help -->
164 <li><b>Improvements to existing features:
</b>
168 <li>The support for booting legacy (BIOS) OSes on UEFI-based PCs
169 currently has a number of limitations. Most importantly, it works
170 off of the list of boot devices stored in the computer's NVRAM. I'd
171 prefer to have it scan disks and partitions, as the Mac's legacy
172 boot support does. Also, the UEFI legacy boot code presents empty
173 optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific
176 <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for
<i>x
</i>86
177 or
<i>x
</i>86-
64 systems and displays this information in its
178 "About" screen (
<tt>AboutrEFInd()
</tt> in
<tt>main.c
</tt>). I'd
179 like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
180 way to test such changes.
</li>
182 <li>Further to the preceding, rEFInd's GPT-scanning code (used to
183 extract partition names) includes assumptions about byte order, and
184 so will work only on little-endian CPUs such as the x86 and
187 <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
190 <li>The program's font features could be greatly improved by enabling
191 use of a standard font format, by enabling use of non-ASCII
192 characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as
193 monospace fonts.
</li>
195 <li>The
<tt>default_selection
</tt> might be expanded to support some
196 form of specification of disk types, as in a special entry for any
197 optical disk or any external disk, no matter what its name is.
</li>
199 <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
200 and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
201 boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).
</li>
203 <li>Currently the background for certain subscreens (such as the
204 information page or submenu listings) is a solid color based on the
205 upper-left corner of the screen. Having an option to support a
206 transparent background is desirable to some users.
</li>
208 <li>When delivering rEFInd as a boot loader from a network server,
209 rEFInd is limited to its default options and can boot only local
210 OSes, not network OSes. The cause is that the server delivers a
211 single file, so rEFInd is divorced from its configuration and
214 <li>A way to identify specific Windows versions and present unique
215 icons or change the text is desirable. Currently, a crude
216 distinction of XP and earlier vs. Vista and later is possible for
217 BIOS-booting on Macs, but no such distinction is made for EFI-mode
218 booting, and nothing finer-grained is attempted. Improvements will
219 probably require identifying unique features of each version's boot
220 loader files or boot sector code.
</li>
222 </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
224 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:
</b>
228 <li>I've been receiving reports of blank screens when using rEFInd on
229 some recent Mac models. I've investigated this with the help of one
230 user, and I suspect that Apple has made changes to its firmware
231 that are likely to affect just about any EFI program. I don't have
232 a definitive solution, but at least one user has reported that
233 removing rEFInd's drivers has caused the problem to go into
236 <li>The
<a href=
"http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
237 Hybrid EFI
</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
238 <tt>StriCmp()
</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
239 This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
240 Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
241 parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
242 "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
243 firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
244 other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
245 mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
246 problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
247 to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
248 since I think
<tt>StriCmp()
</tt> is being called internally to the
249 EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
250 OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
251 implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
254 <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
255 PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
258 <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
259 UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
260 Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
263 <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
264 features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
265 but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
266 Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
267 causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
268 (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
269 unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
270 have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
271 receiving a patch.
</li>
273 <li>If you use a true MBR disk on a Mac to boot Windows or some other
274 BIOS-only OS, and if that disk has an extended partition, bogus
275 additional BIOS/legacy-bootable options may appear in the rEFInd
276 menu. The reason appears to be a bug in the handling of
277 extended/logical partitions in the
<tt>refind/lib.c
</tt> file, but
278 I haven't fully tracked it down.
</li>
280 <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
281 ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
282 This should be investigated and fixed.
</li>
284 <li>The
"scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
285 re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
286 nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
289 <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
290 re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
291 have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
292 caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
293 shell's pathname but not the device identifier.
</li>
295 <li>When specifying a volume by name in
<tt>dont_scan_dirs
</tt>,
296 slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
297 in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
298 volume by name if it includes a slash (as in
<tt>Fedora
299 /boot
</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
300 and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.
</li>
302 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
303 similar problems.
</li>
305 <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID
1 array with Btrfs, HFS+,
306 or FAT filesystem, rEFInd will detect kernels or boot loaders in
307 RAID
1 twice. Checks to prevent this with ext2/
3/
4fs and ReiserFS
308 already exist; these checks could be expanded to block such
309 duplication with more filesystems.
</li>
311 <li>Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states
312 when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to
313 test and experiment with this (my only Intel-based Mac doesn't
314 exhibit this problem), so I can't fix this myself.
<a
315 href=
"apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91139/why-does-my-mbp-sleep-on-mountain-lion-and-often-not-wake-up/91150#91150">Using
316 <tt>pmset
</tt> to disable the
<tt>autopoweroff
</tt> option
</a> is
318 href=
"http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91529/macbook-air-not-waking-up-from-suspend-sleep-with-refind-boot-manager-installed">claimed
319 by some
</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though. Using
320 the
<tt>--ownhfs
</tt> installation option may also help in some
323 <li>If you activate BIOS-mode support on UEFI-based PCs, you may find
324 multiple copies of the BIOS-mode loaders added to your firmware's
325 boot manager. Only one copy shows up in rEFInd, though.
</li>
327 </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
329 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:
</b>
333 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
334 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
335 can see how it could be for some people.
</li>
337 <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
338 whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X
10.7.
339 Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
340 understanding is that it will work correctly
<i>if
</i> rEFInd is
341 installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
343 href=
"https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
344 forum thread
</a> for more information.
</li>
346 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
347 boot options and then save them to the
<tt>refind.conf
</tt> file.
348 One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
349 stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
350 boot loader file.
</li>
352 <li>Along similar lines, some users have asked for a way to take
353 detected boot programs and create a set of manual boot stanzas for
354 them, so that they can be modified manually.
</li>
356 <li>Support for touchscreens and/or configurable buttons for rEFInd's
357 actions would enable use of rEFInd on tablet computers that lack
358 complete keyboards.
</li>
360 <li>GRUB provides a configuration-file command called
<tt>outb
</tt>
361 that enables manipulating hardware registers. Something similar,
362 via the
<tt>mm
</tt> command, can be done in the EFI shell. I'd like
363 to add such a feature to rEFInd, since it enables doing things like
364 disabling one or another video output on Macs with two video
367 <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
368 information utility
—something to tell you about your hard
369 disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
370 the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
371 and in recovering from boot problems.
</li>
373 <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
374 A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
375 requires access to the
<tt>bcfg
</tt> command, this would work
376 only from a version
2 shell or if
<tt>bcfg
</tt> were implemented
377 as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
380 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
381 loader settings
—say, to disable one specific boot loader or
382 change its icon.
</li>
384 <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
385 monitors would be helpful.
</li>
387 <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
388 priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
389 written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
390 can be used on any of the major OSes.
</li>
392 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
394 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:
</b>
398 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Only XFS and JFS
399 are missing from the major Linux filesystems. UDF would also be a
400 welcome addition, as might drivers for other OSes (say, for the
401 BSDs, especially if BSD developers create a boot loader similar to
402 Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers
403 for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.
</li>
405 <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
406 to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
409 <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
410 one driver on my
32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
411 <i>not
</i> have this problem with
64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
412 computers. I don't know if this is a
32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
413 This is
<i>not
</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
414 since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
415 that way don't exhibit this bug.
</li>
417 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
419 <li><b>Improvements to
<tt>gptsync
</tt>,
<tt>install.sh
</tt>, or other
424 <li>The
<tt>gptsync
</tt> program can return misleading error codes
425 under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the
426 partition table. Fix this.
</li>
428 <li>When updating a system with Secure Boot via an RPM or Debian
429 package, the RPM installation script can detect rEFInd's existing
430 shim or PreLoader program and pass options to
<tt>install.sh
</tt>
431 to try to copy these programs over themselves. This results in a
432 message that the copy was over the same file and an error message
433 that there were problems with the installation, although this isn't
434 really the case.
</li>
436 <li>rEFInd's support for network booting is primitive and relies on the
437 external iPXE package. In my own testing, iPXE retrieves the
438 BIOS-mode boot loader from some servers that offer both, which
439 makes it useless on those networks.
</li>
441 <li>A Mac-specific package is highly desirable.
</li>
449 <p>copyright
© 2012–2015 by Roderick W. Smith
</p>
451 <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>
453 <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>
455 <p><a href=
"index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page
</a></p>
457 <p><a href=
"using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd
</a></p>
459 <p><a href=
"http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return
</a> to my main Web page.
</p>