code.delx.au - refind/blob - docs/refind/todo.html

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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 4/24/2016, referencing rEFInd 0.10.3</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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 120
 121 <hr />
 122
 123 <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>
 124
 125 <hr />
 126
 127 <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>
 128
 129 <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>
 130
 131 <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>
 132
 133 <ul>
 134
 135 <li><b>Tasks with which non-programmers can help:</b>
 136
 137     <ul>
 138
 139     <li>Testing! rEFIt was complex enough that changes such as the ones
 140         I've made have the potential to disrupt the program's operation in
 141         unexpected ways. Since the initial 0.2.0 release, I've continued to
 142         add features to rEFInd, and every new feature is another way for
 143         bugs to get into the program. I can only test on a handful of
 144         systems with a limited number of configurations. Therefore, if you
 145         try rEFInd and run into bugs, please report them to me!</li>
 146
 147     <li>rEFIt's original design, and hence rEFInd's design, enables easy
 148         theming by replacing icon files. If you'd like to design a new
 149         theme for rEFInd, feel free to submit it. I might or might not
 150         replace the icons it uses now (most of which come from the Oxygen
 151         Icons package), but I may provide links to themes on this Web site
 152         (or even host them on the project's Sourceforge page). For more
 153         information on designing themes for rEFInd, see the <a
 154         href="themes.html">Theming rEFInd</a> page.</li>
 155
 156     </ul></li> <!-- Non-programmer help -->
 157
 158 <li><b>Improvements to existing features:</b>
 159
 160     <ul>
 161
 162     <li>As described in reference to version 0.9.2 on the <a
 163         href="revisions.html">Revisions</a> page, rEFInd includes a
 164         delicate and hackish workaround to a problem introduced by Shim
 165         0.8. Developing a better solution to that problem is a high
 166         priority.</li>
 167
 168     <li>rEFInd's <tt>Makefile</tt>s and, to a lesser extent, C code,
 169         support <i>x</i>86, <i>x</i>86-64, and ARM64 CPUs. EFI is also
 170         available for Itanium (IA-64) and ARM32 CPUs, so I'd like to add
 171         this support.</li>
 172
 173     <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86,
 174         <i>x</i>86-64, or ARM64 systems and displays this information in
 175         its "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
 176         like to add detection for Itanium and 32-bit ARM systems, but I
 177         have no way to test such changes.</li>
 178
 179     <li>Further to the preceding, rEFInd's GPT-scanning code (used to
 180         extract partition names) includes assumptions about byte order, and
 181         so will work only on little-endian CPUs such as the x86 and
 182         x86-64.</li>
 183
 184     <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
 185         purposes.</li>
 186
 187     <li>The program's font features could be greatly improved by enabling
 188         use of a standard font format, by enabling use of non-ASCII
 189         characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as
 190         monospace fonts.</li>
 191
 192     <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> might be expanded to support some
 193         form of specification of disk types, as in a special entry for any
 194         optical disk or any external disk, no matter what its name is.</li>
 195
 196     <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
 197         and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
 198         boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
 199
 200     <li>Currently the background for certain subscreens (such as the
 201         information page or submenu listings) is a solid color based on the
 202         upper-left corner of the screen. Having an option to support a
 203         transparent background is desirable to some users.</li>
 204
 205     <li>When delivering rEFInd as a boot loader from a network server,
 206         rEFInd is limited to its default options and can boot only local
 207         OSes, not network OSes. The cause is that the server delivers a
 208         single file, so rEFInd is divorced from its configuration and
 209         support files.</li>
 210
 211     <li>A way to identify specific Windows versions and present unique
 212         icons or change the text is desirable. Currently, a crude
 213         distinction of XP and earlier vs. Vista and later is possible for
 214         BIOS-booting on Macs, but no such distinction is made for EFI-mode
 215         booting, and nothing finer-grained is attempted. Improvements will
 216         probably require identifying unique features of each version's boot
 217         loader files or boot sector code.</li>
 218
 219     <li>The support for booting legacy (BIOS) OSes on UEFI-based PCs
 220         currently has a number of limitations. Most importantly, it works
 221         off of the list of boot devices stored in the computer's NVRAM. I'd
 222         prefer to have it scan disks and partitions, as the Mac's legacy
 223         boot support does. Also, the UEFI legacy boot code presents empty
 224         optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific icons.
 225         This said, BIOS support is becoming increasingly unimportant as the
 226         transition from BIOS to EFI continues, so I'm unlikely to put effort
 227         into this issue myself.</li>
 228
 229 </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
 230
 231 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
 232
 233     <ul>
 234
 235     <li>I've been receiving reports of blank screens when using rEFInd on
 236         some recent Mac models. I've investigated this with the help of one
 237         user, and I suspect that Apple has made changes to its firmware
 238         that are likely to affect just about any EFI program. I don't have
 239         a definitive solution, but at least one user has reported that
 240         removing rEFInd's drivers has caused the problem to go into
 241         remission.</li>
 242
 243     <li>Another Mac-specific display problem relates to "retina" displays:
 244         Some users report that rEFInd comes up in a lower resolution than
 245         the screen supports, and that this setting persists into the running
 246         OS X instance, and can't be adjusted using the usual OS X means.
 247         Unfortunately, I lack the hardware necessary to experiment and find
 248         a solution to this problem within rEFInd. Thus, a fix will have to
 249         wait for me to get my hands on such hardware (which is not on my
 250         immediate purchase list) or until somebody with such hardware and
 251         the necessary skills submits a fix. (Note that a fix could
 252         conceivably involve passing options to the OS X boot loader or
 253         something else that would require trivial or no changes to
 254         rEFInd.)</li>
 255
 256     <li>Some EFIs have bugs that cause the allegedly case-insensitive
 257         <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
 258         This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
 259         Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
 260         parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
 261         "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
 262         firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
 263         other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
 264         mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). This problem is
 265         worse when compiling rEFInd with GNU-EFI than with Tianocore.
 266         Version 0.9.1 has made improvements on this score, but some issues
 267         may continue to lurk.</li>
 268
 269     <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
 270         PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
 271         fixed.</li>
 272
 273     <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
 274         UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
 275         Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
 276         do it.</li>
 277
 278     <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
 279         features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
 280         but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
 281         Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
 282         causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
 283         (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
 284         unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
 285         have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
 286         receiving a patch.</li>
 287
 288     <li>If you use a true MBR disk on a Mac to boot Windows or some other
 289         BIOS-only OS, and if that disk has an extended partition, bogus
 290         additional BIOS/legacy-bootable options may appear in the rEFInd
 291         menu. The reason appears to be a bug in the handling of
 292         extended/logical partitions in the <tt>refind/lib.c</tt> file, but
 293         I haven't fully tracked it down.</li>
 294
 295     <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
 296         ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
 297         This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
 298
 299     <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
 300         re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
 301         nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
 302         EFI.</li>
 303
 304     <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
 305         re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
 306         have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
 307         caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
 308         shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
 309
 310     <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
 311         slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
 312         in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
 313         volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
 314         /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
 315         and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
 316
 317     <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
 318         similar problems.</li>
 319
 320     <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array with Btrfs, HFS+,
 321         or FAT filesystem, rEFInd will detect kernels or boot loaders in
 322         RAID 1 twice. Checks to prevent this with ext2/3/4fs and ReiserFS
 323         already exist; these checks could be expanded to block such
 324         duplication with more filesystems.</li>
 325
 326     <li>Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states
 327         when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to
 328         test and experiment with this (my only Intel-based Mac doesn't
 329         exhibit this problem), so I can't fix this myself. <a
 330         href="apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91139/why-does-my-mbp-sleep-on-mountain-lion-and-often-not-wake-up/91150#91150">Using
 331         <tt>pmset</tt> to disable the <tt>autopoweroff</tt> option</a> is
 332         <a
 333         href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91529/macbook-air-not-waking-up-from-suspend-sleep-with-refind-boot-manager-installed">claimed
 334         by some</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though. Using
 335         the <tt>--ownhfs</tt> installation option may also help in some
 336         cases.</li>
 337
 338     <li>If you activate BIOS-mode support on UEFI-based PCs, you may find
 339         multiple copies of the BIOS-mode loaders added to your firmware's
 340         boot manager. Only one copy shows up in rEFInd, though.</li>
 341
 342     </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
 343
 344 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
 345
 346     <ul>
 347
 348     <li>Currently, debugging rEFInd requires adding <tt>Print()</tt>
 349         statements to the code. Adding a logging facility that supports
 350         multiple log levels and writes the output to a file would help with
 351         debugging, especially when dealing with problem reports from
 352         users.</li>
 353
 354     <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
 355         boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
 356         One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
 357         stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
 358         boot loader file.</li>
 359
 360     <li>Along similar lines, some users have asked for a way to take
 361         detected boot programs and create a set of manual boot stanzas for
 362         them, so that they can be modified manually.</li>
 363
 364     <li>Support for touchscreens and/or configurable buttons for rEFInd's
 365         actions would enable use of rEFInd on tablet computers that lack
 366         complete keyboards.</li>
 367
 368     <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
 369         monitors or who use tablets would be helpful.</li>
 370
 371     <li>GRUB provides a configuration-file command called <tt>outb</tt>
 372         that enables manipulating hardware registers. Something similar,
 373         via the <tt>mm</tt> command, can be done in the EFI shell. I'd like
 374         to add such a feature to rEFInd, since it enables doing things like
 375         disabling one or another video output on Macs with two video
 376         cards.</li>
 377
 378     <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
 379         information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
 380         disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
 381         the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
 382         and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
 383
 384     <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
 385         A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
 386         requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
 387         only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
 388         as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
 389         written in C.</li>
 390
 391     <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
 392         loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
 393         change its icon.</li>
 394
 395     <li>A GUI configuration tool for host OSes (Linux, OS X, Windows, etc.)
 396         would be nice, but it's low on my personal priority list. If you'd
 397         like to contribute, I prefer something written in a cross-platform
 398         GUI toolkit, so that a single code base can be used on any of the
 399         major OSes.</li>
 400
 401     <li>The ability to produce audio output (at least a simple "beep") to signal
 402         to visually impaired users when rEFInd is ready to accept input would be
 403         helpful.</li>
 404
 405     <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
 406         BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
 407         can see how it could be for some people.</li>
 408
 409     </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
 410
 411 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
 412
 413     <ul>
 414
 415     <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Only XFS and JFS
 416         are missing from the major Linux filesystems. UDF would also be a
 417         welcome addition, as might drivers for other OSes (say, for the
 418         BSDs, especially if BSD developers create a boot loader similar to
 419         Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers
 420         for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.</li>
 421
 422     <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
 423         to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
 424         desirable.</li>
 425
 426     <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
 427         one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
 428         <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
 429         computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
 430         This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
 431         since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
 432         that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
 433
 434     </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
 435
 436 <li><b>Improvements to <tt>gptsync</tt>, <tt>refind-install</tt>, or other
 437     support tools:</b>
 438
 439     <ul>
 440
 441     <li>The <tt>gptsync</tt> program can return misleading error codes
 442         under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the
 443         partition table. Fix this.</li>
 444
 445     <li>rEFInd's support for network booting is primitive and relies on the
 446         external iPXE package. In my own testing, iPXE retrieves the
 447         BIOS-mode boot loader from some servers that offer both, which
 448         makes it useless on those networks.</li>
 449
 450     <li>A Mac-specific package is highly desirable.</li>
 451
 452     </ul></li>
 453
 454 </ul>
 455
 456 <hr />
 457
 458 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2016 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 459
 460 <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>
 461
 462 <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>
 463
 464 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 465
 466 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
 467
 468   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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