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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 6/27/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.7.0</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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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>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple
181 image sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file,
182 rEFInd can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the
183 desired size would be useful.</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>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot
194 loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID
195 from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's
196 label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
197
198 <li>Currently, if a filesystem's label comes up empty, rEFInd
199 substitutes the size, so you get displays like <tt>boot
200 EFI\foo\bar.efi from 90 GiB volume</tt>. I'd like to add more
201 checks to substitute the GPT <i>partition</i> label if the
202 <i>filesystem</i> label comes up empty.</li>
203
204 <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> option in <tt>refind.conf</tt> could
205 be improved by supporting a list of default options, so that if the
206 first item isn't found, rEFInd will try to boot the second one in
207 the list, and so on. This could be handy in case a driver fails to
208 load, or to provide an override in case the user inserts a specific
209 removable disk&mdash;by placing the removable disk's name first in
210 the list, it will take precedence over the normal hard disk
211 default.</li>
212
213 <li>Along the lines of the previous item, the
214 <tt>default_selection</tt> might be expanded to support some form
215 of specification of disk types, as in a special entry for any
216 optical disk or any external disk, no matter what its name is.</li>
217
218 <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
219 and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
220 boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
221
222 </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
223
224 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
225
226 <ul>
227
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
234 remission.</li>
235
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
252 let it go.</li>
253
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
256 fixed.</li>
257
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
261 do it.</li>
262
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>
272
273 <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
274 ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
275 This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
276
277 <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
278 re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
279 nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
280 EFI.</li>
281
282 <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
283 re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
284 have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
285 caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
286 shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
287
288 <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
289 slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
290 in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
291 volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
292 /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
293 and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
294
295 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
296 similar problems.</li>
297
298 <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array, rEFInd will detect
299 kernels or boot loaders in RAID 1 twice. This could be fixed by
300 adding a check for duplicate filesystem UUIDs to the
301 partition-scanning code.</li>
302
303 <li>Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states
304 when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to
305 test and experiment with this (my only Intel-based Mac doesn't
306 exhibit this problem), so I can't fix this myself. <a
307 href="apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91139/why-does-my-mbp-sleep-on-mountain-lion-and-often-not-wake-up/91150#91150">Using
308 <tt>pmset</tt> to disable the <tt>autopoweroff</tt> option</a> is
309 <a
310 href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91529/macbook-air-not-waking-up-from-suspend-sleep-with-refind-boot-manager-installed">claimed
311 by some</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though.</li>
312
313 </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
314
315 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
316
317 <ul>
318
319 <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
320 it would.</li>
321
322 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
323 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
324 can see how it could be for some people.</li>
325
326 <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
327 whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
328 Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
329 understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
330 installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
331 See <a
332 href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
333 forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
334
335 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
336 boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
337 One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
338 stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
339 boot loader file.</li>
340
341 <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
342 information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
343 disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
344 the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
345 and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
346
347 <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
348 A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
349 requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
350 only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
351 as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
352 written in C.</li>
353
354 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
355 loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
356 change its icon.</li>
357
358 <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
359 monitors would be helpful.</li>
360
361 <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
362 priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
363 written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
364 can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
365
366 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
367
368 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
369
370 <ul>
371
372 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Only XFS and JFS
373 are missing from the major Linux filesystems. UDF would also be a
374 welcome addition, as might drivers for other OSes (say, for the
375 BSDs, especially if BSD developers create a boot loader similar to
376 Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers
377 for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.</li>
378
379 <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
380 what the volume's real label is.</li>
381
382 <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
383 to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
384 desirable.</li>
385
386 <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
387 one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
388 <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
389 computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
390 This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
391 since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
392 that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
393
394 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
395
396 <li><b>Improvements to <tt>gptsync</tt>, <tt>install.sh</tt>, or other
397 support tools:</b>
398
399 <ul>
400
401 <li>The <tt>gptsync</tt> program can return misleading error codes
402 under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the
403 partition table. Fix this.</li>
404
405 <li>When updating a system with Secure Boot via an RPM or Debian
406 package, the RPM installation script can detect rEFInd's existing
407 shim or PreLoader program and pass options to <tt>install.sh</tt>
408 to try to copy these programs over themselves. This results in a
409 message that the copy was over the same file and an error message
410 that there were problems with the installation, although this isn't
411 really the case.</li>
412
413 <li>A Mac-specific package is highly desirable.</li>
414
415 </ul></li>
416
417 </ul>
418
419 <hr />
420
421 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
422
423 <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>
424
425 <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>
426
427 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
428
429 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
430
431 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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