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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 2/3/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.7</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>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
154 purposes.</li>
155
156 <li>The program's font features could be greatly improved by enabling
157 use of a standard font format, by enabling use of non-ASCII
158 characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as
159 monospace fonts.</li>
160
161 <li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot
162 loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID
163 from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's
164 label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
165
166 <li>Currently, if a filesystem's label comes up empty, rEFInd
167 substitutes the size, so you get displays like <tt>boot
168 EFI\foo\bar.efi from 90 GiB volume</tt>. I'd like to add more
169 checks to substitute the GPT <i>partition</i> label if the
170 <i>filesystem</i> label comes up empty.</li>
171
172 <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> option in <tt>refind.conf</tt> could
173 be improved by supporting a list of default options, so that if the
174 first item isn't found, rEFInd will try to boot the second one in
175 the list, and so on. This could be handy in case a driver fails to
176 load, or to provide an override in case the user inserts a specific
177 removable disk&mdash;by placing the removable disk's name first in
178 the list, it will take precedence over the normal hard disk
179 default.</li>
180
181 <li>Along the lines of the previous item, the default_selection might
182 be expanded to support some form of specification of disk types, as
183 in a special entry for any optical disk or any external disk, no
184 matter what its name is.</li>
185
186 <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
187 and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
188 boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
189
190 </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
191
192 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
193
194 <ul>
195
196 <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
197 Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
198 <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
199 This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
200 Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
201 parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
202 "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
203 firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
204 other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
205 mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
206 problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
207 to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
208 since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
209 EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
210 OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
211 implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
212 let it go.</li>
213
214 <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
215 PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
216 fixed.</li>
217
218 <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
219 UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
220 Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
221 do it.</li>
222
223 <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
224 ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
225 This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
226
227 <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
228 re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
229 nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
230 EFI.</li>
231
232 <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
233 re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
234 have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
235 caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
236 shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
237
238 <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
239 slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
240 in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
241 volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
242 /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
243 and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
244
245 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
246 similar problems.</li>
247
248 </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
249
250 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
251
252 <ul>
253
254 <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
255 it would.</li>
256
257 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
258 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
259 can see how it could be for some people.</li>
260
261 <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
262 whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
263 Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
264 understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
265 installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
266 See <a
267 href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
268 forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
269
270 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
271 boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
272 One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
273 stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
274 boot loader file.</li>
275
276 <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
277 information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
278 disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
279 the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
280 and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
281
282 <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
283 A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
284 requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
285 only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
286 as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
287 written in C.</li>
288
289 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
290 loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
291 change its icon.</li>
292
293 <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
294 priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
295 written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
296 can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
297
298 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
299
300 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
301
302 <ul>
303
304 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Given the talk of
305 shifting to Btrfs, that should be the priority; however, other
306 Linux filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
307 additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
308 RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
309
310 <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
311 are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
312 that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
313 the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
314 system that uses <a
315 href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
316 I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.</li>
317
318 <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
319 what the volume's real label is.</li>
320
321 <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
322 to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
323 desirable.</li>
324
325 <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
326 one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
327 <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
328 computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
329 This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
330 since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
331 that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
332
333 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
334
335 </ul>
336
337 <hr />
338
339 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
340
341 <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>
342
343 <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>
344
345 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
346
347 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
348
349 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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