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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 3/18/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.8</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>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>
  98
  99 <ul>
 100
 101 <li><b>Tasks with which non-programmers can help:</b>
 102
 103     <ul>
 104
 105     <li>Testing! rEFIt was complex enough that changes such as the ones
 106         I've made have the potential to disrupt the program's operation in
 107         unexpected ways. Since the initial 0.2.0 release, I've continued to
 108         add features to rEFInd, and every new feature is another way for
 109         bugs to get into the program. I can only test on a handful of
 110         systems with a limited number of configurations. Therefore, if you
 111         try rEFInd and run into bugs, please report them to me!</li>
 112
 113     <li>I have little talent with graphics manipulation programs, so
 114         rEFInd's boot logo, such as it is, is pretty weak. If you have
 115         artistic talent and would like to create a rEFInd logo, please feel
 116         free to send it to me. I won't make any final decision about
 117         changes until at least June 30 of 2012.</li>
 118
 119     <li>rEFIt's original design, and hence rEFInd's design, enables easy
 120         theming by replacing icon files. If you'd like to design a new
 121         theme for rEFInd, feel free to submit it. I might or might not
 122         replace the icons it uses now (most of which come from the Oxygen
 123         Icons package), but I may provide links to themes on this Web site
 124         (or even host them on the project's Sourceforge page). For more
 125         information on designing themes for rEFInd, see the <a
 126         href="themes.html">Theming rEFInd</a> page.</li>
 127
 128     </ul></li> <!-- Non-programmer help -->
 129
 130 <li><b>Improvements to existing features:</b>
 131
 132     <ul>
 133
 134     <li>The support for booting legacy (BIOS) OSes on UEFI-based PCs
 135         currently has a number of limitations. Most importantly, it works
 136         off of the list of boot devices stored in the computer's NVRAM. I'd
 137         prefer to have it scan disks and partitions, as the Mac's legacy
 138         boot support does. Also, the UEFI legacy boot code presents empty
 139         optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific
 140         icons.</li>
 141
 142     <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86
 143         or <i>x</i>86-64 systems and displays this information in its
 144         "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
 145         like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
 146         way to test such changes.</li>
 147
 148     <li>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple
 149         image sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file,
 150         rEFInd can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the
 151         desired size would be useful.</li>
 152
 153     <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
 154         purposes.</li>
 155
 156     <li>The program's font features could be greatly improved by enabling
 157         use of a standard font format, by enabling use of non-ASCII
 158         characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as
 159         monospace fonts.</li>
 160
 161     <li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot
 162         loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID
 163         from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's
 164         label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
 165
 166     <li>Currently, if a filesystem's label comes up empty, rEFInd
 167         substitutes the size, so you get displays like <tt>boot
 168         EFI\foo\bar.efi from 90 GiB volume</tt>. I'd like to add more
 169         checks to substitute the GPT <i>partition</i> label if the
 170         <i>filesystem</i> label comes up empty.</li>
 171
 172     <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> option in <tt>refind.conf</tt> could
 173         be improved by supporting a list of default options, so that if the
 174         first item isn't found, rEFInd will try to boot the second one in
 175         the list, and so on. This could be handy in case a driver fails to
 176         load, or to provide an override in case the user inserts a specific
 177         removable disk&mdash;by placing the removable disk's name first in
 178         the list, it will take precedence over the normal hard disk
 179         default.</li>
 180
 181     <li>Along the lines of the previous item, the default_selection might
 182         be expanded to support some form of specification of disk types, as
 183         in a special entry for any optical disk or any external disk, no
 184         matter what its name is.</li>
 185
 186     <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
 187         and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
 188         boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
 189
 190     </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
 191
 192 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
 193
 194     <ul>
 195
 196     <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
 197         Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
 198         <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
 199         This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
 200         Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
 201         parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
 202         "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
 203         firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
 204         other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
 205         mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
 206         problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
 207         to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
 208         since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
 209         EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
 210         OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
 211         implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
 212         let it go.</li>
 213
 214     <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
 215         PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
 216         fixed.</li>
 217
 218     <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
 219         UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
 220         Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
 221         do it.</li>
 222
 223     <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
 224         features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
 225         but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
 226         Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
 227         causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
 228         (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
 229         unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
 230         have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
 231         receiving a patch.</li>
 232
 233     <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
 234         ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
 235         This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
 236
 237     <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
 238         re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
 239         nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
 240         EFI.</li>
 241
 242     <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
 243         re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
 244         have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
 245         caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
 246         shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
 247
 248     <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
 249         slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
 250         in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
 251         volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
 252         /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
 253         and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
 254
 255     <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
 256         similar problems.</li>
 257
 258     <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array, rEFInd will detect
 259         kernels or boot loaders in RAID 1 twice. This could be fixed by
 260         adding a check for duplicate filesystem UUIDs to the
 261         partition-scanning code.</li>
 262
 263     </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
 264
 265 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
 266
 267     <ul>
 268
 269     <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
 270         it would.</li>
 271
 272     <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
 273         BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
 274         can see how it could be for some people.</li>
 275
 276     <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
 277         whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
 278         Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
 279         understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
 280         installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
 281         See <a
 282         href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
 283         forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
 284
 285     <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
 286         boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
 287         One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
 288         stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
 289         boot loader file.</li>
 290
 291     <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
 292         information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
 293         disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
 294         the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
 295         and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
 296
 297     <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
 298         A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
 299         requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
 300         only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
 301         as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
 302         written in C.</li>
 303
 304     <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
 305         loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
 306         change its icon.</li>
 307
 308     <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
 309         priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
 310         written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
 311         can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
 312
 313     </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
 314
 315 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
 316
 317     <ul>
 318
 319     <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Given the talk of
 320         shifting to Btrfs, that should be the priority; however, other
 321         Linux filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
 322         additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
 323         RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
 324
 325     <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
 326         are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
 327         that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
 328         the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
 329         system that uses <a
 330         href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
 331         I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.</li>
 332
 333     <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
 334         what the volume's real label is.</li>
 335
 336     <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
 337         to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
 338         desirable.</li>
 339
 340     <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
 341         one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
 342         <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
 343         computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
 344         This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
 345         since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
 346         that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
 347
 348     </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
 349
 350 </ul>
 351
 352 <hr />
 353
 354 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 355
 356 <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>
 357
 358 <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>
 359
 360 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 361
 362 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
 363
 364   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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