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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 5/4/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.3.2</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>Without further ado, then, and in no particular order:</p>
98
99 <ul>
100
101 <li>Testing! rEFIt was complex enough that changes such as the ones I've
102 made have the potential to disrupt the program's operation in
103 unexpected ways. Since the initial 0.2.0 release, I've continued to add
104 features to rEFInd, and every new feature is another way for bugs to
105 get into the program. I can only test on a handful of systems with a
106 limited number of configurations. Therefore, if you try rEFInd and run
107 into bugs, please report them to me!</li>
108
109 <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86 or
110 <i>x</i>86-64 systems and displays this information in its "About"
111 screen (AboutrEFInd() in main.c). I'd like to add detection for Itanium
112 and ARM systems, but I have no way to test such changes.</li>
113
114 <li>I have little talent with graphics manipulation programs, so rEFInd's
115 boot logo, such as it is, is pretty weak. If you have artistic talent
116 and would like to create a rEFInd logo, please feel free to send it to
117 me. I won't make any final decision about changes until at least June
118 30 of 2012.</li>
119
120 <li>rEFIt's original design, and hence rEFInd's design, enables easy
121 theming by replacing icon files. If you'd like to design a new theme
122 for rEFInd, feel free to submit it. I might or might not replace the
123 icons it uses now (most of which come from the Oxygen Icons package),
124 but I may provide a way to make selecting a theme from one of several
125 installed themes easy, and provide links to themes on this Web site (or
126 even host them on the project's Sourceforge page). For more information
127 on designing themes for rEFInd, see the <a href="themes.html">Theming
128 rEFInd</a> page.</li>
129
130 <li>The code could be more flexible in its handling of the sizes of various
131 graphical elements, and particularly drawn text. Prior to version
132 0.2.2, submenu text was invisible on UEFI-based PCs with 800x600 and
133 smaller displays because of an inability to properly crop the graphics
134 fields that hold the text. With version 0.2.2, I've put a band-aid on
135 this problem by reducing the field size so that it now works on 800x600
136 displays, but smaller displays still suffer from this problem. This is
137 just an example of the inflexibility of certain layout issues within
138 rEFInd.</li>
139
140 <li>Text mode has a known display glitch: Not all loaders are shown until
141 you use the cursor keys to move down the list, effectively "drawing"
142 the "invisible" tags. This obviously needs to be fixed.</li>
143
144 <li>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple image
145 sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file, rEFInd
146 can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the desired size
147 would be useful.</li>
148
149 <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if it
150 would.</li>
151
152 <li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot loader
153 resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID from the
154 partition data is harder than extracting the volume's label or counting
155 up the filesystem numbers.</li>
156
157 <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders and/or
158 initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the boot
159 loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
160
161 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
162 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I can
163 see how it could be for some people.</li>
164
165 <li>I'd like to find a way to get rEFInd to launch BIOS boot loaders on
166 UEFI-based systems. This option currently works only on Macs&mdash;or
167 at least, I've not gotten it to work on any of my UEFI-based PCs. (I
168 have an idea about this, but haven't yet investigated it in detail. If
169 you'd like to help on this, <a
170 href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">e-mail me</a> for my
171 thoughts.)</li>
172
173 <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte Hybrid
174 EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
175 <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
176 This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance: Changing
177 the case of icon filename extensions (or various other parts of icon
178 filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly "generic" ones; and
179 rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the firmware sometimes
180 returns an all-caps version of the filename, but other times returns
181 the filename with the correct case, causing a mismatch if the path
182 includes lowercase elements). Some of these problems can be overcome by
183 converting both strings to be compared to one case before doing the
184 comparison, but others aren't so easy, since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt>
185 is being called internally to the EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to
186 fix some of these problems. OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on
187 just one EFI implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined
188 to just let it go.</li>
189
190 <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
191 whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7. Unfortunately,
192 I lack the hardware to test this.</li>
193
194 <li>The Page Up and Page Down keys work in a rather strange way&mdash;a
195 result of an admittedly quick fix on my part to a problem with a data
196 structure that makes implementation of scrolling harder than it ought
197 to be.</li>
198
199 <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on UEFI-based PCs.
200 On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
201 fixed.</li>
202
203 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for boot
204 options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.</li>
205
206 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot loader
207 settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or change its
208 icon.</li>
209
210 <li>A way to read boot options set via <tt>efibootmgr</tt>, <tt>bless</tt>,
211 or similar options from NVRAM to add to the boot set would be
212 useful.</li>
213
214 <li>A way to examine and change the NVRAM settings could be useful. This
215 would enable a CD-based boot of rEFInd to fix a broken disk boot.
216 Perhaps this could be done via a separate tool that could be launched
217 much like the shell or <tt>gptsync</tt>.</li>
218
219 <li>I'd like to find a way to have rEFInd re-scan removable media when
220 they're inserted.</li>
221
222 <li>Enabling users to eject removable media would be useful.</li>
223
224 <li>I'd like to give the user the ability to set custom options on a
225 per-boot basis, similar to what's possible in GRUB.</li>
226
227 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and similar
228 problems.</p>
229
230 </ul>
231
232 <hr />
233
234 <p>copyright &copy; 2012 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
235
236 <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>
237
238 <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>
239
240 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
241
242 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
243
244 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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