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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 2/1/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.5</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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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 <li>When delivering rEFInd as a boot loader from a network server,
207 rEFInd is limited to its default options and can boot only local
208 OSes, not network OSes. The cause is that the server delivers a
209 single file, so rEFInd is divorced from its configuration and
210 support files.</li>
211
212 </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
213
214 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
215
216 <ul>
217
218 <li>I've been receiving reports of blank screens when using rEFInd on
219 some recent Mac models. I've investigated this with the help of one
220 user, and I suspect that Apple has made changes to its firmware
221 that are likely to affect just about any EFI program. I don't have
222 a definitive solution, but at least one user has reported that
223 removing rEFInd's drivers has caused the problem to go into
224 remission.</li>
225
226 <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
227 Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
228 <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
229 This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
230 Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
231 parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
232 "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
233 firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
234 other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
235 mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
236 problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
237 to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
238 since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
239 EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
240 OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
241 implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
242 let it go.</li>
243
244 <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
245 PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
246 fixed.</li>
247
248 <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
249 UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
250 Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
251 do it.</li>
252
253 <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
254 features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
255 but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
256 Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
257 causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
258 (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
259 unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
260 have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
261 receiving a patch.</li>
262
263 <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
264 ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
265 This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
266
267 <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
268 re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
269 nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
270 EFI.</li>
271
272 <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
273 re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
274 have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
275 caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
276 shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
277
278 <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
279 slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
280 in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
281 volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
282 /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
283 and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
284
285 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
286 similar problems.</li>
287
288 <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array with Btrfs, HFS+,
289 or FAT filesystem, rEFInd will detect kernels or boot loaders in
290 RAID 1 twice. Checks to prevent this with ext2/3/4fs and ReiserFS
291 already exist; these checks could be expanded to block such
292 duplication with more filesystems.</li>
293
294 <li>Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states
295 when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to
296 test and experiment with this (my only Intel-based Mac doesn't
297 exhibit this problem), so I can't fix this myself. <a
298 href="apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91139/why-does-my-mbp-sleep-on-mountain-lion-and-often-not-wake-up/91150#91150">Using
299 <tt>pmset</tt> to disable the <tt>autopoweroff</tt> option</a> is
300 <a
301 href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91529/macbook-air-not-waking-up-from-suspend-sleep-with-refind-boot-manager-installed">claimed
302 by some</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though. Using
303 the <tt>--ownhfs</tt> installation option may also help in some
304 cases.</li>
305
306 <li>If you activate BIOS-mode support on UEFI-based PCs, you may find
307 multiple copies of the BIOS-mode loaders added to your firmware's
308 boot manager. Only one copy shows up in rEFInd, though.</li>
309
310 </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
311
312 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
313
314 <ul>
315
316 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
317 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
318 can see how it could be for some people.</li>
319
320 <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
321 whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
322 Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
323 understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
324 installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
325 See <a
326 href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
327 forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
328
329 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
330 boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
331 One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
332 stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
333 boot loader file.</li>
334
335 <li>Along similar lines, some users have asked for a way to take
336 detected boot programs and create a set of manual boot stanzas for
337 them, so that they can be modified manually.</li>
338
339 <li>GRUB provides a configuration-file command called <tt>outb</tt>
340 that enables manipulating hardware registers. Something similar,
341 via the <tt>mm</tt> command, can be done in the EFI shell. I'd like
342 to add such a feature to rEFInd, since it enables doing things like
343 disabling one or another video output on Macs with two video
344 cards.</li>
345
346 <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
347 information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
348 disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
349 the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
350 and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
351
352 <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
353 A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
354 requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
355 only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
356 as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
357 written in C.</li>
358
359 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
360 loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
361 change its icon.</li>
362
363 <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
364 monitors would be helpful.</li>
365
366 <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
367 priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
368 written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
369 can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
370
371 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
372
373 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
374
375 <ul>
376
377 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Only XFS and JFS
378 are missing from the major Linux filesystems. UDF would also be a
379 welcome addition, as might drivers for other OSes (say, for the
380 BSDs, especially if BSD developers create a boot loader similar to
381 Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers
382 for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.</li>
383
384 <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
385 to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
386 desirable.</li>
387
388 <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
389 one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
390 <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
391 computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
392 This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
393 since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
394 that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
395
396 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
397
398 <li><b>Improvements to <tt>gptsync</tt>, <tt>install.sh</tt>, or other
399 support tools:</b>
400
401 <ul>
402
403 <li>The <tt>gptsync</tt> program can return misleading error codes
404 under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the
405 partition table. Fix this.</li>
406
407 <li>When updating a system with Secure Boot via an RPM or Debian
408 package, the RPM installation script can detect rEFInd's existing
409 shim or PreLoader program and pass options to <tt>install.sh</tt>
410 to try to copy these programs over themselves. This results in a
411 message that the copy was over the same file and an error message
412 that there were problems with the installation, although this isn't
413 really the case.</li>
414
415 <li>rEFInd's support for network booting is primitive and relies on the
416 external iPXE package. In my own testing, iPXE retrieves the
417 BIOS-mode boot loader from some servers that offer both, which
418 makes it useless on those networks.</li>
419
420 <li>A Mac-specific package is highly desirable.</li>
421
422 </ul></li>
423
424 </ul>
425
426 <hr />
427
428 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2014 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
429
430 <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>
431
432 <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>
433
434 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
435
436 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
437
438 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
439 </body>
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