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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 12/12/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.10.1</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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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>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>rEFInd's <tt>Makefile</tt>s and, to a lesser extent, C code,
177 support <i>x</i>86, <i>x</i>86-64, and ARM64 CPUs. EFI is also
178 available for Itanium (IA-64) and ARM32 CPUs, so I'd like to add
179 this support.</li>
180
181 <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86,
182 <i>x</i>86-64, or ARM64 systems and displays this information in
183 its "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
184 like to add detection for Itanium and 32-bit ARM systems, but I
185 have no way to test such changes.</li>
186
187 <li>Further to the preceding, rEFInd's GPT-scanning code (used to
188 extract partition names) includes assumptions about byte order, and
189 so will work only on little-endian CPUs such as the x86 and
190 x86-64.</li>
191
192 <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
193 purposes.</li>
194
195 <li>The program's font features could be greatly improved by enabling
196 use of a standard font format, by enabling use of non-ASCII
197 characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as
198 monospace fonts.</li>
199
200 <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> might be expanded to support some
201 form of specification of disk types, as in a special entry for any
202 optical disk or any external disk, no matter what its name is.</li>
203
204 <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
205 and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
206 boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
207
208 <li>Currently the background for certain subscreens (such as the
209 information page or submenu listings) is a solid color based on the
210 upper-left corner of the screen. Having an option to support a
211 transparent background is desirable to some users.</li>
212
213 <li>When delivering rEFInd as a boot loader from a network server,
214 rEFInd is limited to its default options and can boot only local
215 OSes, not network OSes. The cause is that the server delivers a
216 single file, so rEFInd is divorced from its configuration and
217 support files.</li>
218
219 <li>A way to identify specific Windows versions and present unique
220 icons or change the text is desirable. Currently, a crude
221 distinction of XP and earlier vs. Vista and later is possible for
222 BIOS-booting on Macs, but no such distinction is made for EFI-mode
223 booting, and nothing finer-grained is attempted. Improvements will
224 probably require identifying unique features of each version's boot
225 loader files or boot sector code.</li>
226
227 </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
228
229 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
230
231 <ul>
232
233 <li>I've been receiving reports of blank screens when using rEFInd on
234 some recent Mac models. I've investigated this with the help of one
235 user, and I suspect that Apple has made changes to its firmware
236 that are likely to affect just about any EFI program. I don't have
237 a definitive solution, but at least one user has reported that
238 removing rEFInd's drivers has caused the problem to go into
239 remission.</li>
240
241 <li>Some EFIs have bugs that cause the allegedly case-insensitive
242 <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
243 This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
244 Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
245 parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
246 "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
247 firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
248 other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
249 mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). This problem is
250 worse when compiling rEFInd with GNU-EFI than with Tianocore.
251 Version 0.9.1 has made improvements on this score, but some issues
252 may continue to lurk.</li>
253
254 <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
255 PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
256 fixed.</li>
257
258 <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
259 UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
260 Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
261 do it.</li>
262
263 <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
264 features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
265 but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
266 Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
267 causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
268 (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
269 unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
270 have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
271 receiving a patch.</li>
272
273 <li>If you use a true MBR disk on a Mac to boot Windows or some other
274 BIOS-only OS, and if that disk has an extended partition, bogus
275 additional BIOS/legacy-bootable options may appear in the rEFInd
276 menu. The reason appears to be a bug in the handling of
277 extended/logical partitions in the <tt>refind/lib.c</tt> file, but
278 I haven't fully tracked it down.</li>
279
280 <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
281 ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
282 This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
283
284 <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
285 re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
286 nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
287 EFI.</li>
288
289 <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
290 re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
291 have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
292 caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
293 shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
294
295 <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
296 slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
297 in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
298 volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
299 /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
300 and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
301
302 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
303 similar problems.</li>
304
305 <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array with Btrfs, HFS+,
306 or FAT filesystem, rEFInd will detect kernels or boot loaders in
307 RAID 1 twice. Checks to prevent this with ext2/3/4fs and ReiserFS
308 already exist; these checks could be expanded to block such
309 duplication with more filesystems.</li>
310
311 <li>Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states
312 when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to
313 test and experiment with this (my only Intel-based Mac doesn't
314 exhibit this problem), so I can't fix this myself. <a
315 href="apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91139/why-does-my-mbp-sleep-on-mountain-lion-and-often-not-wake-up/91150#91150">Using
316 <tt>pmset</tt> to disable the <tt>autopoweroff</tt> option</a> is
317 <a
318 href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91529/macbook-air-not-waking-up-from-suspend-sleep-with-refind-boot-manager-installed">claimed
319 by some</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though. Using
320 the <tt>--ownhfs</tt> installation option may also help in some
321 cases.</li>
322
323 <li>If you activate BIOS-mode support on UEFI-based PCs, you may find
324 multiple copies of the BIOS-mode loaders added to your firmware's
325 boot manager. Only one copy shows up in rEFInd, though.</li>
326
327 </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
328
329 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
330
331 <ul>
332
333 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
334 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
335 can see how it could be for some people.</li>
336
337 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
338 boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
339 One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
340 stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
341 boot loader file.</li>
342
343 <li>Along similar lines, some users have asked for a way to take
344 detected boot programs and create a set of manual boot stanzas for
345 them, so that they can be modified manually.</li>
346
347 <li>Support for touchscreens and/or configurable buttons for rEFInd's
348 actions would enable use of rEFInd on tablet computers that lack
349 complete keyboards.</li>
350
351 <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
352 monitors or who use tablets would be helpful.</li>
353
354 <li>GRUB provides a configuration-file command called <tt>outb</tt>
355 that enables manipulating hardware registers. Something similar,
356 via the <tt>mm</tt> command, can be done in the EFI shell. I'd like
357 to add such a feature to rEFInd, since it enables doing things like
358 disabling one or another video output on Macs with two video
359 cards.</li>
360
361 <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
362 information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
363 disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
364 the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
365 and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
366
367 <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
368 A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
369 requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
370 only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
371 as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
372 written in C.</li>
373
374 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
375 loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
376 change its icon.</li>
377
378 <li>A GUI configuration tool for host OSes (Linux, OS X, Windows, etc.)
379 would be nice, but it's low on my personal priority list. If you'd
380 like to contribute, I prefer something written in a cross-platform
381 GUI toolkit, so that a single code base can be used on any of the
382 major OSes.</li>
383
384 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
385
386 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
387
388 <ul>
389
390 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Only XFS and JFS
391 are missing from the major Linux filesystems. UDF would also be a
392 welcome addition, as might drivers for other OSes (say, for the
393 BSDs, especially if BSD developers create a boot loader similar to
394 Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers
395 for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.</li>
396
397 <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
398 to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
399 desirable.</li>
400
401 <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
402 one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
403 <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
404 computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
405 This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
406 since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
407 that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
408
409 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
410
411 <li><b>Improvements to <tt>gptsync</tt>, <tt>refind-install</tt>, or other
412 support tools:</b>
413
414 <ul>
415
416 <li>The <tt>gptsync</tt> program can return misleading error codes
417 under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the
418 partition table. Fix this.</li>
419
420 <li>rEFInd's support for network booting is primitive and relies on the
421 external iPXE package. In my own testing, iPXE retrieves the
422 BIOS-mode boot loader from some servers that offer both, which
423 makes it useless on those networks.</li>
424
425 <li>A Mac-specific package is highly desirable.</li>
426
427 </ul></li>
428
429 </ul>
430
431 <hr />
432
433 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2015 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
434
435 <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>
436
437 <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>
438
439 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
440
441 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
442
443 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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