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14 <h1>The rEFInd Boot Manager:<br />The Future of rEFInd</h1>
15
16 <p class="subhead">by Roderick W. Smith, <a
17 href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
18
19 <p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
20 11/8/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.10.0</p>
21
22
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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127 <hr />
128
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>
130
131 <hr />
132
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>
134
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>
136
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>
138
139 <ul>
140
141 <li><b>Tasks with which non-programmers can help:</b>
142
143 <ul>
144
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>
152
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>
161
162 </ul></li> <!-- Non-programmer help -->
163
164 <li><b>Improvements to existing features:</b>
165
166 <ul>
167
168 <li>As described in reference to version 0.9.2 on the <a
169 href="revisions.html">Revisions</a> page, rEFInd includes a
170 delicate and hackish workaround to a problem introduced by Shim
171 0.8. Developing a better solution to that problem is a high
172 priority.</li>
173
174 <li>The support for booting legacy (BIOS) OSes on UEFI-based PCs
175 currently has a number of limitations. Most importantly, it works
176 off of the list of boot devices stored in the computer's NVRAM. I'd
177 prefer to have it scan disks and partitions, as the Mac's legacy
178 boot support does. Also, the UEFI legacy boot code presents empty
179 optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific
180 icons.</li>
181
182 <li>rEFInd's <tt>Makefile</tt>s and, to a lesser extent, C code,
183 support <i>x</i>86, <i>x</i>86-64, and ARM64 CPUs. EFI is also
184 available for Itanium (IA-64) and ARM32 CPUs, so I'd like to add
185 this support.</li>
186
187 <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86,
188 <i>x</i>86-64, or ARM64 systems and displays this information in
189 its "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
190 like to add detection for Itanium and 32-bit ARM systems, but I
191 have no way to test such changes.</li>
192
193 <li>Further to the preceding, rEFInd's GPT-scanning code (used to
194 extract partition names) includes assumptions about byte order, and
195 so will work only on little-endian CPUs such as the x86 and
196 x86-64.</li>
197
198 <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
199 purposes.</li>
200
201 <li>The program's font features could be greatly improved by enabling
202 use of a standard font format, by enabling use of non-ASCII
203 characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as
204 monospace fonts.</li>
205
206 <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> might be expanded to support some
207 form of specification of disk types, as in a special entry for any
208 optical disk or any external disk, no matter what its name is.</li>
209
210 <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
211 and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
212 boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
213
214 <li>Currently the background for certain subscreens (such as the
215 information page or submenu listings) is a solid color based on the
216 upper-left corner of the screen. Having an option to support a
217 transparent background is desirable to some users.</li>
218
219 <li>When delivering rEFInd as a boot loader from a network server,
220 rEFInd is limited to its default options and can boot only local
221 OSes, not network OSes. The cause is that the server delivers a
222 single file, so rEFInd is divorced from its configuration and
223 support files.</li>
224
225 <li>A way to identify specific Windows versions and present unique
226 icons or change the text is desirable. Currently, a crude
227 distinction of XP and earlier vs. Vista and later is possible for
228 BIOS-booting on Macs, but no such distinction is made for EFI-mode
229 booting, and nothing finer-grained is attempted. Improvements will
230 probably require identifying unique features of each version's boot
231 loader files or boot sector code.</li>
232
233 </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
234
235 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
236
237 <ul>
238
239 <li>I've been receiving reports of blank screens when using rEFInd on
240 some recent Mac models. I've investigated this with the help of one
241 user, and I suspect that Apple has made changes to its firmware
242 that are likely to affect just about any EFI program. I don't have
243 a definitive solution, but at least one user has reported that
244 removing rEFInd's drivers has caused the problem to go into
245 remission.</li>
246
247 <li>Some EFIs have bugs that cause the allegedly case-insensitive
248 <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
249 This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
250 Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
251 parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
252 "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
253 firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
254 other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
255 mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). This problem is
256 worse when compiling rEFInd with GNU-EFI than with Tianocore.
257 Version 0.9.1 has made improvements on this score, but some issues
258 may continue to lurk.</li>
259
260 <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
261 PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
262 fixed.</li>
263
264 <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
265 UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
266 Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
267 do it.</li>
268
269 <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
270 features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
271 but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
272 Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
273 causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
274 (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
275 unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
276 have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
277 receiving a patch.</li>
278
279 <li>If you use a true MBR disk on a Mac to boot Windows or some other
280 BIOS-only OS, and if that disk has an extended partition, bogus
281 additional BIOS/legacy-bootable options may appear in the rEFInd
282 menu. The reason appears to be a bug in the handling of
283 extended/logical partitions in the <tt>refind/lib.c</tt> file, but
284 I haven't fully tracked it down.</li>
285
286 <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
287 ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
288 This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
289
290 <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
291 re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
292 nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
293 EFI.</li>
294
295 <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
296 re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
297 have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
298 caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
299 shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
300
301 <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
302 slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
303 in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
304 volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
305 /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
306 and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
307
308 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
309 similar problems.</li>
310
311 <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array with Btrfs, HFS+,
312 or FAT filesystem, rEFInd will detect kernels or boot loaders in
313 RAID 1 twice. Checks to prevent this with ext2/3/4fs and ReiserFS
314 already exist; these checks could be expanded to block such
315 duplication with more filesystems.</li>
316
317 <li>Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states
318 when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to
319 test and experiment with this (my only Intel-based Mac doesn't
320 exhibit this problem), so I can't fix this myself. <a
321 href="apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91139/why-does-my-mbp-sleep-on-mountain-lion-and-often-not-wake-up/91150#91150">Using
322 <tt>pmset</tt> to disable the <tt>autopoweroff</tt> option</a> is
323 <a
324 href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91529/macbook-air-not-waking-up-from-suspend-sleep-with-refind-boot-manager-installed">claimed
325 by some</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though. Using
326 the <tt>--ownhfs</tt> installation option may also help in some
327 cases.</li>
328
329 <li>If you activate BIOS-mode support on UEFI-based PCs, you may find
330 multiple copies of the BIOS-mode loaders added to your firmware's
331 boot manager. Only one copy shows up in rEFInd, though.</li>
332
333 </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
334
335 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
336
337 <ul>
338
339 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
340 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
341 can see how it could be for some people.</li>
342
343 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
344 boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
345 One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
346 stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
347 boot loader file.</li>
348
349 <li>Along similar lines, some users have asked for a way to take
350 detected boot programs and create a set of manual boot stanzas for
351 them, so that they can be modified manually.</li>
352
353 <li>Support for touchscreens and/or configurable buttons for rEFInd's
354 actions would enable use of rEFInd on tablet computers that lack
355 complete keyboards.</li>
356
357 <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
358 monitors or who use tablets would be helpful.</li>
359
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
365 cards.</li>
366
367 <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
368 information utility&mdash;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>
372
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
378 written in C.</li>
379
380 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
381 loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
382 change its icon.</li>
383
384 <li>A GUI configuration tool for host OSes (Linux, OS X, Windows, etc.)
385 would be nice, but it's low on my personal priority list. If you'd
386 like to contribute, I prefer something written in a cross-platform
387 GUI toolkit, so that a single code base can be used on any of the
388 major OSes.</li>
389
390 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
391
392 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
393
394 <ul>
395
396 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Only XFS and JFS
397 are missing from the major Linux filesystems. UDF would also be a
398 welcome addition, as might drivers for other OSes (say, for the
399 BSDs, especially if BSD developers create a boot loader similar to
400 Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers
401 for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.</li>
402
403 <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
404 to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
405 desirable.</li>
406
407 <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
408 one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
409 <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
410 computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
411 This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
412 since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
413 that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
414
415 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
416
417 <li><b>Improvements to <tt>gptsync</tt>, <tt>refind-install</tt>, or other
418 support tools:</b>
419
420 <ul>
421
422 <li>The <tt>gptsync</tt> program can return misleading error codes
423 under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the
424 partition table. Fix this.</li>
425
426 <li>rEFInd's support for network booting is primitive and relies on the
427 external iPXE package. In my own testing, iPXE retrieves the
428 BIOS-mode boot loader from some servers that offer both, which
429 makes it useless on those networks.</li>
430
431 <li>A Mac-specific package is highly desirable.</li>
432
433 </ul></li>
434
435 </ul>
436
437 <hr />
438
439 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2015 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
440
441 <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>
442
443 <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>
444
445 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
446
447 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
448
449 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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