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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 4/25/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.9</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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 124
 125 <hr />
 126
 127 <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>
 128
 129 <hr />
 130
 131 <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>
 132
 133 <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>
 134
 135 <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>
 136
 137 <ul>
 138
 139 <li><b>Tasks with which non-programmers can help:</b>
 140
 141     <ul>
 142
 143     <li>Testing! rEFIt was complex enough that changes such as the ones
 144         I've made have the potential to disrupt the program's operation in
 145         unexpected ways. Since the initial 0.2.0 release, I've continued to
 146         add features to rEFInd, and every new feature is another way for
 147         bugs to get into the program. I can only test on a handful of
 148         systems with a limited number of configurations. Therefore, if you
 149         try rEFInd and run into bugs, please report them to me!</li>
 150
 151     <li>I have little talent with graphics manipulation programs, so
 152         rEFInd's boot logo, such as it is, is pretty weak. If you have
 153         artistic talent and would like to create a rEFInd logo, please feel
 154         free to send it to me. I won't make any final decision about
 155         changes until at least June 30 of 2012.</li>
 156
 157     <li>rEFIt's original design, and hence rEFInd's design, enables easy
 158         theming by replacing icon files. If you'd like to design a new
 159         theme for rEFInd, feel free to submit it. I might or might not
 160         replace the icons it uses now (most of which come from the Oxygen
 161         Icons package), but I may provide links to themes on this Web site
 162         (or even host them on the project's Sourceforge page). For more
 163         information on designing themes for rEFInd, see the <a
 164         href="themes.html">Theming rEFInd</a> page.</li>
 165
 166     </ul></li> <!-- Non-programmer help -->
 167
 168 <li><b>Improvements to existing features:</b>
 169
 170     <ul>
 171
 172     <li>The support for booting legacy (BIOS) OSes on UEFI-based PCs
 173         currently has a number of limitations. Most importantly, it works
 174         off of the list of boot devices stored in the computer's NVRAM. I'd
 175         prefer to have it scan disks and partitions, as the Mac's legacy
 176         boot support does. Also, the UEFI legacy boot code presents empty
 177         optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific
 178         icons.</li>
 179
 180     <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86
 181         or <i>x</i>86-64 systems and displays this information in its
 182         "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
 183         like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
 184         way to test such changes.</li>
 185
 186     <li>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple
 187         image sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file,
 188         rEFInd can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the
 189         desired size would be useful.</li>
 190
 191     <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
 192         purposes.</li>
 193
 194     <li>The program's font features could be greatly improved by enabling
 195         use of a standard font format, by enabling use of non-ASCII
 196         characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as
 197         monospace fonts.</li>
 198
 199     <li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot
 200         loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID
 201         from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's
 202         label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
 203
 204     <li>Currently, if a filesystem's label comes up empty, rEFInd
 205         substitutes the size, so you get displays like <tt>boot
 206         EFI\foo\bar.efi from 90 GiB volume</tt>. I'd like to add more
 207         checks to substitute the GPT <i>partition</i> label if the
 208         <i>filesystem</i> label comes up empty.</li>
 209
 210     <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> option in <tt>refind.conf</tt> could
 211         be improved by supporting a list of default options, so that if the
 212         first item isn't found, rEFInd will try to boot the second one in
 213         the list, and so on. This could be handy in case a driver fails to
 214         load, or to provide an override in case the user inserts a specific
 215         removable disk&mdash;by placing the removable disk's name first in
 216         the list, it will take precedence over the normal hard disk
 217         default.</li>
 218
 219     <li>Along the lines of the previous item, the default_selection might
 220         be expanded to support some form of specification of disk types, as
 221         in a special entry for any optical disk or any external disk, no
 222         matter what its name is.</li>
 223
 224     <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
 225         and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
 226         boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
 227
 228     </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
 229
 230 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
 231
 232     <ul>
 233
 234     <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
 235         Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
 236         <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
 237         This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
 238         Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
 239         parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
 240         "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
 241         firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
 242         other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
 243         mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
 244         problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
 245         to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
 246         since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
 247         EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
 248         OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
 249         implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
 250         let it go.</li>
 251
 252     <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
 253         PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
 254         fixed.</li>
 255
 256     <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
 257         UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
 258         Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
 259         do it.</li>
 260
 261     <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
 262         features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
 263         but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
 264         Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
 265         causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
 266         (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
 267         unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
 268         have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
 269         receiving a patch.</li>
 270
 271     <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
 272         ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
 273         This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
 274
 275     <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
 276         re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
 277         nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
 278         EFI.</li>
 279
 280     <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
 281         re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
 282         have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
 283         caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
 284         shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
 285
 286     <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
 287         slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
 288         in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
 289         volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
 290         /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
 291         and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
 292
 293     <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
 294         similar problems.</li>
 295
 296     <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array, rEFInd will detect
 297         kernels or boot loaders in RAID 1 twice. This could be fixed by
 298         adding a check for duplicate filesystem UUIDs to the
 299         partition-scanning code.</li>
 300
 301     </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
 302
 303 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
 304
 305     <ul>
 306
 307     <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
 308         it would.</li>
 309
 310     <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
 311         BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
 312         can see how it could be for some people.</li>
 313
 314     <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
 315         whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
 316         Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
 317         understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
 318         installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
 319         See <a
 320         href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
 321         forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
 322
 323     <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
 324         boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
 325         One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
 326         stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
 327         boot loader file.</li>
 328
 329     <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
 330         information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
 331         disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
 332         the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
 333         and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
 334
 335     <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
 336         A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
 337         requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
 338         only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
 339         as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
 340         written in C.</li>
 341
 342     <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
 343         loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
 344         change its icon.</li>
 345
 346     <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
 347         monitors would be helpful.</li>
 348
 349     <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
 350         priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
 351         written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
 352         can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
 353
 354     </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
 355
 356 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
 357
 358     <ul>
 359
 360     <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Given the talk of
 361         shifting to Btrfs, that should be the priority; however, other
 362         Linux filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
 363         additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
 364         RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
 365
 366     <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
 367         are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
 368         that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
 369         the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
 370         system that uses <a
 371         href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
 372         I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.</li>
 373
 374     <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
 375         what the volume's real label is.</li>
 376
 377     <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
 378         to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
 379         desirable.</li>
 380
 381     <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
 382         one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
 383         <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
 384         computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
 385         This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
 386         since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
 387         that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
 388
 389     </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
 390
 391 </ul>
 392
 393 <hr />
 394
 395 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 396
 397 <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>
 398
 399 <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>
 400
 401 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 402
 403 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
 404
 405   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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