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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 5/5/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.10</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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 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>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>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
 229         Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
 230         <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
 231         This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
 232         Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
 233         parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
 234         "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
 235         firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
 236         other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
 237         mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
 238         problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
 239         to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
 240         since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
 241         EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
 242         OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
 243         implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
 244         let it go.</li>
 245
 246     <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
 247         PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
 248         fixed.</li>
 249
 250     <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
 251         UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
 252         Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
 253         do it.</li>
 254
 255     <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
 256         features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
 257         but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
 258         Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
 259         causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
 260         (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
 261         unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
 262         have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
 263         receiving a patch.</li>
 264
 265     <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
 266         ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
 267         This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
 268
 269     <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
 270         re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
 271         nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
 272         EFI.</li>
 273
 274     <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
 275         re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
 276         have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
 277         caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
 278         shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
 279
 280     <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
 281         slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
 282         in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
 283         volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
 284         /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
 285         and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
 286
 287     <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
 288         similar problems.</li>
 289
 290     <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array, rEFInd will detect
 291         kernels or boot loaders in RAID 1 twice. This could be fixed by
 292         adding a check for duplicate filesystem UUIDs to the
 293         partition-scanning code.</li>
 294
 295     </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
 296
 297 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
 298
 299     <ul>
 300
 301     <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
 302         it would.</li>
 303
 304     <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
 305         BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
 306         can see how it could be for some people.</li>
 307
 308     <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
 309         whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
 310         Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
 311         understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
 312         installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
 313         See <a
 314         href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
 315         forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
 316
 317     <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
 318         boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
 319         One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
 320         stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
 321         boot loader file.</li>
 322
 323     <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
 324         information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
 325         disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
 326         the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
 327         and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
 328
 329     <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
 330         A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
 331         requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
 332         only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
 333         as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
 334         written in C.</li>
 335
 336     <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
 337         loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
 338         change its icon.</li>
 339
 340     <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
 341         monitors would be helpful.</li>
 342
 343     <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
 344         priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
 345         written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
 346         can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
 347
 348     </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
 349
 350 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
 351
 352     <ul>
 353
 354     <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Given the talk of
 355         shifting to Btrfs, that should be the priority; however, other
 356         Linux filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
 357         additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
 358         RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
 359
 360     <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
 361         are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
 362         that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
 363         the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
 364         system that uses <a
 365         href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
 366         I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.</li>
 367
 368     <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
 369         what the volume's real label is.</li>
 370
 371     <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
 372         to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
 373         desirable.</li>
 374
 375     <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
 376         one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
 377         <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
 378         computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
 379         This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
 380         since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
 381         that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
 382
 383     </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
 384
 385 </ul>
 386
 387 <hr />
 388
 389 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 390
 391 <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>
 392
 393 <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>
 394
 395 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 396
 397 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
 398
 399   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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