code.delx.au - refind/blob - docs/refind/todo.html

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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 5/15/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.1</p>
  19
  20
  21 <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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 124
 125 <hr />
 126
 127 <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>
 128
 129 <hr />
 130
 131 <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>
 132
 133 <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>
 134
 135 <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>
 136
 137 <ul>
 138
 139 <li><b>Tasks with which non-programmers can help:</b>
 140
 141     <ul>
 142
 143     <li>Testing! rEFIt was complex enough that changes such as the ones
 144         I've made have the potential to disrupt the program's operation in
 145         unexpected ways. Since the initial 0.2.0 release, I've continued to
 146         add features to rEFInd, and every new feature is another way for
 147         bugs to get into the program. I can only test on a handful of
 148         systems with a limited number of configurations. Therefore, if you
 149         try rEFInd and run into bugs, please report them to me!</li>
 150
 151     <li>rEFIt's original design, and hence rEFInd's design, enables easy
 152         theming by replacing icon files. If you'd like to design a new
 153         theme for rEFInd, feel free to submit it. I might or might not
 154         replace the icons it uses now (most of which come from the Oxygen
 155         Icons package), but I may provide links to themes on this Web site
 156         (or even host them on the project's Sourceforge page). For more
 157         information on designing themes for rEFInd, see the <a
 158         href="themes.html">Theming rEFInd</a> page.</li>
 159
 160     </ul></li> <!-- Non-programmer help -->
 161
 162 <li><b>Improvements to existing features:</b>
 163
 164     <ul>
 165
 166     <li>The support for booting legacy (BIOS) OSes on UEFI-based PCs
 167         currently has a number of limitations. Most importantly, it works
 168         off of the list of boot devices stored in the computer's NVRAM. I'd
 169         prefer to have it scan disks and partitions, as the Mac's legacy
 170         boot support does. Also, the UEFI legacy boot code presents empty
 171         optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific
 172         icons.</li>
 173
 174     <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86
 175         or <i>x</i>86-64 systems and displays this information in its
 176         "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
 177         like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
 178         way to test such changes.</li>
 179
 180     <li>Further to the preceding, rEFInd's GPT-scanning code (used to
 181         extract partition names) includes assumptions about byte order, and
 182         so will work only on little-endian CPUs such as the x86 and
 183         x86-64.</li>
 184
 185     <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
 186         purposes.</li>
 187
 188     <li>The program's font features could be greatly improved by enabling
 189         use of a standard font format, by enabling use of non-ASCII
 190         characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as
 191         monospace fonts.</li>
 192
 193     <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> might be expanded to support some
 194         form of specification of disk types, as in a special entry for any
 195         optical disk or any external disk, no matter what its name is.</li>
 196
 197     <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
 198         and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
 199         boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
 200
 201     <li>Currently the background for certain subscreens (such as the
 202         information page or submenu listings) is a solid color based on the
 203         upper-left corner of the screen. Having an option to support a
 204         transparent background is desirable to some users.</li>
 205
 206     </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
 207
 208 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
 209
 210     <ul>
 211
 212     <li>I've been receiving reports of blank screens when using rEFInd on
 213         some recent Mac models. I've investigated this with the help of one
 214         user, and I suspect that Apple has made changes to its firmware
 215         that are likely to affect just about any EFI program. I don't have
 216         a definitive solution, but at least one user has reported that
 217         removing rEFInd's drivers has caused the problem to go into
 218         remission.</li>
 219
 220     <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
 221         Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
 222         <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
 223         This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
 224         Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
 225         parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
 226         "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
 227         firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
 228         other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
 229         mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
 230         problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
 231         to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
 232         since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
 233         EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
 234         OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
 235         implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
 236         let it go.</li>
 237
 238     <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
 239         PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
 240         fixed.</li>
 241
 242     <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
 243         UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
 244         Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
 245         do it.</li>
 246
 247     <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
 248         features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
 249         but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
 250         Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
 251         causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
 252         (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
 253         unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
 254         have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
 255         receiving a patch.</li>
 256
 257     <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
 258         ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
 259         This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
 260
 261     <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
 262         re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
 263         nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
 264         EFI.</li>
 265
 266     <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
 267         re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
 268         have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
 269         caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
 270         shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
 271
 272     <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
 273         slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
 274         in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
 275         volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
 276         /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
 277         and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
 278
 279     <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
 280         similar problems.</li>
 281
 282     <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array with Btrfs, HFS+,
 283         or FAT filesystem, rEFInd will detect kernels or boot loaders in
 284         RAID 1 twice. Checks to prevent this with ext2/3/4fs and ReiserFS
 285         already exist; these checks could be expanded to block such
 286         duplication with more filesystems.</li>
 287
 288     <li>Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states
 289         when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to
 290         test and experiment with this (my only Intel-based Mac doesn't
 291         exhibit this problem), so I can't fix this myself. <a
 292         href="apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91139/why-does-my-mbp-sleep-on-mountain-lion-and-often-not-wake-up/91150#91150">Using
 293         <tt>pmset</tt> to disable the <tt>autopoweroff</tt> option</a> is
 294         <a
 295         href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91529/macbook-air-not-waking-up-from-suspend-sleep-with-refind-boot-manager-installed">claimed
 296         by some</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though. Using
 297         the <tt>--ownhfs</tt> installation option may also help in some
 298         cases.</li>
 299
 300     <li>If you activate BIOS-mode support on UEFI-based PCs, you may find
 301         multiple copies of the BIOS-mode loaders added to your firmware's
 302         boot manager. Only one copy shows up in rEFInd, though.</li>
 303
 304     </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
 305
 306 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
 307
 308     <ul>
 309
 310     <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
 311         it would.</li>
 312
 313     <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
 314         BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
 315         can see how it could be for some people.</li>
 316
 317     <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
 318         whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
 319         Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
 320         understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
 321         installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
 322         See <a
 323         href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
 324         forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
 325
 326     <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
 327         boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
 328         One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
 329         stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
 330         boot loader file.</li>
 331
 332     <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
 333         information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
 334         disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
 335         the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
 336         and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
 337
 338     <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
 339         A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
 340         requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
 341         only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
 342         as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
 343         written in C.</li>
 344
 345     <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
 346         loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
 347         change its icon.</li>
 348
 349     <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
 350         monitors would be helpful.</li>
 351
 352     <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
 353         priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
 354         written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
 355         can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
 356
 357     </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
 358
 359 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
 360
 361     <ul>
 362
 363     <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Only XFS and JFS
 364         are missing from the major Linux filesystems. UDF would also be a
 365         welcome addition, as might drivers for other OSes (say, for the
 366         BSDs, especially if BSD developers create a boot loader similar to
 367         Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers
 368         for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.</li>
 369
 370     <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
 371         to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
 372         desirable.</li>
 373
 374     <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
 375         one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
 376         <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
 377         computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
 378         This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
 379         since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
 380         that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
 381
 382     </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
 383
 384 <li><b>Improvements to <tt>gptsync</tt>, <tt>install.sh</tt>, or other
 385     support tools:</b>
 386
 387     <ul>
 388
 389     <li>The <tt>gptsync</tt> program can return misleading error codes
 390         under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the
 391         partition table. Fix this.</li>
 392
 393     <li>When updating a system with Secure Boot via an RPM or Debian
 394         package, the RPM installation script can detect rEFInd's existing
 395         shim or PreLoader program and pass options to <tt>install.sh</tt>
 396         to try to copy these programs over themselves. This results in a
 397         message that the copy was over the same file and an error message
 398         that there were problems with the installation, although this isn't
 399         really the case.</li>
 400
 401     <li>A Mac-specific package is highly desirable.</li>
 402
 403     </ul></li>
 404
 405 </ul>
 406
 407 <hr />
 408
 409 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2014 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 410
 411 <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>
 412
 413 <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>
 414
 415 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 416
 417 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
 418
 419   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
 420 </body>
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