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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 9/13/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.9.1</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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126
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>The support for booting legacy (BIOS) OSes on UEFI-based PCs
169 currently has a number of limitations. Most importantly, it works
170 off of the list of boot devices stored in the computer's NVRAM. I'd
171 prefer to have it scan disks and partitions, as the Mac's legacy
172 boot support does. Also, the UEFI legacy boot code presents empty
173 optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific
174 icons.</li>
175
176 <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86
177 or <i>x</i>86-64 systems and displays this information in its
178 "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
179 like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
180 way to test such changes.</li>
181
182 <li>Further to the preceding, rEFInd's GPT-scanning code (used to
183 extract partition names) includes assumptions about byte order, and
184 so will work only on little-endian CPUs such as the x86 and
185 x86-64.</li>
186
187 <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
188 purposes.</li>
189
190 <li>The program's font features could be greatly improved by enabling
191 use of a standard font format, by enabling use of non-ASCII
192 characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as
193 monospace fonts.</li>
194
195 <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> might be expanded to support some
196 form of specification of disk types, as in a special entry for any
197 optical disk or any external disk, no matter what its name is.</li>
198
199 <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
200 and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
201 boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
202
203 <li>Currently the background for certain subscreens (such as the
204 information page or submenu listings) is a solid color based on the
205 upper-left corner of the screen. Having an option to support a
206 transparent background is desirable to some users.</li>
207
208 <li>When delivering rEFInd as a boot loader from a network server,
209 rEFInd is limited to its default options and can boot only local
210 OSes, not network OSes. The cause is that the server delivers a
211 single file, so rEFInd is divorced from its configuration and
212 support files.</li>
213
214 <li>A way to identify specific Windows versions and present unique
215 icons or change the text is desirable. Currently, a crude
216 distinction of XP and earlier vs. Vista and later is possible for
217 BIOS-booting on Macs, but no such distinction is made for EFI-mode
218 booting, and nothing finer-grained is attempted. Improvements will
219 probably require identifying unique features of each version's boot
220 loader files or boot sector code.</li>
221
222 </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
223
224 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
225
226 <ul>
227
228 <li>I've been receiving reports of blank screens when using rEFInd on
229 some recent Mac models. I've investigated this with the help of one
230 user, and I suspect that Apple has made changes to its firmware
231 that are likely to affect just about any EFI program. I don't have
232 a definitive solution, but at least one user has reported that
233 removing rEFInd's drivers has caused the problem to go into
234 remission.</li>
235
236 <li>Some EFIs have bugs that cause the allegedly case-insensitive
237 <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
238 This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
239 Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
240 parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
241 "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
242 firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
243 other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
244 mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). This problem is
245 worse when compiling rEFInd with GNU-EFI than with Tianocore.
246 Version 0.9.1 has made improvements on this score, but some issues
247 may continue to lurk.</li>
248
249 <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
250 PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
251 fixed.</li>
252
253 <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
254 UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
255 Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
256 do it.</li>
257
258 <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
259 features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
260 but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
261 Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
262 causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
263 (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
264 unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
265 have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
266 receiving a patch.</li>
267
268 <li>If you use a true MBR disk on a Mac to boot Windows or some other
269 BIOS-only OS, and if that disk has an extended partition, bogus
270 additional BIOS/legacy-bootable options may appear in the rEFInd
271 menu. The reason appears to be a bug in the handling of
272 extended/logical partitions in the <tt>refind/lib.c</tt> file, but
273 I haven't fully tracked it down.</li>
274
275 <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
276 ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
277 This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
278
279 <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
280 re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
281 nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
282 EFI.</li>
283
284 <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
285 re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
286 have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
287 caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
288 shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
289
290 <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
291 slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
292 in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
293 volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
294 /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
295 and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
296
297 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
298 similar problems.</li>
299
300 <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array with Btrfs, HFS+,
301 or FAT filesystem, rEFInd will detect kernels or boot loaders in
302 RAID 1 twice. Checks to prevent this with ext2/3/4fs and ReiserFS
303 already exist; these checks could be expanded to block such
304 duplication with more filesystems.</li>
305
306 <li>Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states
307 when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to
308 test and experiment with this (my only Intel-based Mac doesn't
309 exhibit this problem), so I can't fix this myself. <a
310 href="apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91139/why-does-my-mbp-sleep-on-mountain-lion-and-often-not-wake-up/91150#91150">Using
311 <tt>pmset</tt> to disable the <tt>autopoweroff</tt> option</a> is
312 <a
313 href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91529/macbook-air-not-waking-up-from-suspend-sleep-with-refind-boot-manager-installed">claimed
314 by some</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though. Using
315 the <tt>--ownhfs</tt> installation option may also help in some
316 cases.</li>
317
318 <li>If you activate BIOS-mode support on UEFI-based PCs, you may find
319 multiple copies of the BIOS-mode loaders added to your firmware's
320 boot manager. Only one copy shows up in rEFInd, though.</li>
321
322 </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
323
324 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
325
326 <ul>
327
328 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
329 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
330 can see how it could be for some people.</li>
331
332 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
333 boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
334 One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
335 stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
336 boot loader file.</li>
337
338 <li>Along similar lines, some users have asked for a way to take
339 detected boot programs and create a set of manual boot stanzas for
340 them, so that they can be modified manually.</li>
341
342 <li>Support for touchscreens and/or configurable buttons for rEFInd's
343 actions would enable use of rEFInd on tablet computers that lack
344 complete keyboards.</li>
345
346 <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
347 monitors or who use tablets would be helpful.</li>
348
349 <li>GRUB provides a configuration-file command called <tt>outb</tt>
350 that enables manipulating hardware registers. Something similar,
351 via the <tt>mm</tt> command, can be done in the EFI shell. I'd like
352 to add such a feature to rEFInd, since it enables doing things like
353 disabling one or another video output on Macs with two video
354 cards.</li>
355
356 <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
357 information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
358 disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
359 the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
360 and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
361
362 <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
363 A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
364 requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
365 only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
366 as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
367 written in C.</li>
368
369 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
370 loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
371 change its icon.</li>
372
373 <li>A GUI configuration tool for host OSes (Linux, OS X, Windows, etc.)
374 would be nice, but it's low on my personal priority list. If you'd
375 like to contribute, I prefer something written in a cross-platform
376 GUI toolkit, so that a single code base can be used on any of the
377 major OSes.</li>
378
379 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
380
381 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
382
383 <ul>
384
385 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Only XFS and JFS
386 are missing from the major Linux filesystems. UDF would also be a
387 welcome addition, as might drivers for other OSes (say, for the
388 BSDs, especially if BSD developers create a boot loader similar to
389 Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers
390 for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.</li>
391
392 <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
393 to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
394 desirable.</li>
395
396 <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
397 one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
398 <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
399 computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
400 This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
401 since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
402 that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
403
404 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
405
406 <li><b>Improvements to <tt>gptsync</tt>, <tt>install.sh</tt>, or other
407 support tools:</b>
408
409 <ul>
410
411 <li>The <tt>gptsync</tt> program can return misleading error codes
412 under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the
413 partition table. Fix this.</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;2015 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>
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