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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 5/20/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.0</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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  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>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86
 135         or <i>x</i>86-64 systems and displays this information in its
 136         "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
 137         like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
 138         way to test such changes.</li>
 139
 140     <li>The code could be more flexible in its handling of the sizes of
 141         various graphical elements, and particularly drawn text. Prior to
 142         version 0.2.2, submenu text was invisible on UEFI-based PCs with
 143         800x600 and smaller displays because of an inability to properly
 144         crop the graphics fields that hold the text. With version 0.2.2,
 145         I've put a band-aid on this problem by reducing the field size so
 146         that it now works on 800x600 displays, but smaller displays still
 147         suffer from this problem. This is just an example of the
 148         inflexibility of certain layout issues within rEFInd.</li>
 149
 150     <li>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple
 151         image sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file,
 152         rEFInd can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the
 153         desired size would be useful.</li>
 154
 155     <li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot
 156         loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID
 157         from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's
 158         label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
 159
 160     <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
 161         and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
 162         boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
 163
 164     </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
 165
 166 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
 167
 168     <ul>
 169
 170     <li>I'd like to find a way to get rEFInd to launch BIOS boot loaders on
 171         UEFI-based systems. This option currently works only on
 172         Macs&mdash;or at least, I've not gotten it to work on any of my
 173         UEFI-based PCs. (I've done some experiments to try to get this to
 174         work, but so far without success. If you'd like to help on this, <a
 175         href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">e-mail me</a> for my
 176         thoughts.)</li>
 177
 178     <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
 179         Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
 180         <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
 181         This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
 182         Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
 183         parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
 184         "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
 185         firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
 186         other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
 187         mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
 188         problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
 189         to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
 190         since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
 191         EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
 192         OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
 193         implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
 194         let it go.</li>
 195
 196     <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on UEFI-based PCs.
 197         On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
 198         fixed.</li>
 199
 200     <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
 201         UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
 202         Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
 203         do it.</li>
 204
 205     <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
 206         similar problems.</p>
 207
 208     </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
 209
 210 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
 211
 212     <ul>
 213
 214     <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
 215         it would.</li>
 216
 217     <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
 218         BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
 219         can see how it could be for some people.</li>
 220
 221     <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
 222         whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
 223         Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
 224         understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
 225         installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
 226         See <a
 227         href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
 228         forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
 229
 230     <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
 231         boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt>
 232         file.</li>
 233
 234     <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
 235         loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
 236         change its icon.</li>
 237
 238     <li>A way to read boot options set via <tt>efibootmgr</tt>,
 239         <tt>bless</tt>, or similar options from NVRAM to add to the boot
 240         set would be useful.</li>
 241
 242     <li>A way to examine and change the NVRAM settings could be useful.
 243         This would enable a CD-based boot of rEFInd to fix a broken disk
 244         boot. Perhaps this could be done via a separate tool that could be
 245         launched much like the shell or <tt>gptsync</tt>.</li>
 246
 247     <li>I'd like to give the user the ability to set custom options on a
 248         single-boot basis, similar to what's possible in GRUB.</li>
 249
 250     </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
 251
 252     <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
 253
 254     <ul>
 255
 256     <li>The drivers I've built fail to load on a 32-bit Mac Mini; I get an
 257         "incompatible version" error message at an EFI shell, or an error
 258         code of 80000019 when rEFInd tries to load them. (These two
 259         messages are equivalent.) I suspect the problem is related to the
 260         EFI version 1.<i>x</i> used on the Mac, as opposed to UEFI
 261         2.<i>x</i> used on PCs. I'm looking into the problem. In the
 262         meantime, if you have this problem, I recommend tracking down
 263         equivalent drivers from other sources. (See the <a
 264         href="drivers.html">drivers page</a> for some pointers.) I'd
 265         appreciate <a href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">hearing from
 266         you</a> if you have problems along these lines. Please tell me what
 267         type of computer you're using, and especially the firmware version
 268         data (from rEFInd's "about" screen). This may help me narrow down
 269         the cause.</li>
 270
 271     <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are required. Given the recent
 272         shift to ext4fs, that should be the priority; however, other Linux
 273         filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
 274         additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
 275         RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
 276
 277     <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
 278         are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
 279         that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
 280         the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
 281         system that uses <a
 282         href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
 283         I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.
 284
 285     <li>The driver installation procedure could be improved, perhaps by
 286         adding support for drivers to the <tt>install.sh</tt> script.
 287
 288     </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
 289
 290 </ul>
 291
 292 <hr />
 293
 294 <p>copyright &copy; 2012 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 295
 296 <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>
 297
 298 <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>
 299
 300 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 301
 302 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
 303
 304   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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