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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 6/3/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.2</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>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86
 135         or <i>x</i>86-64 systems and displays this information in its
 136         "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
 137         like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
 138         way to test such changes.</li>
 139
 140     <li>The code could be more flexible in its handling of the sizes of
 141         various graphical elements, and particularly drawn text. Prior to
 142         version 0.2.2, submenu text was invisible on UEFI-based PCs with
 143         800x600 and smaller displays because of an inability to properly
 144         crop the graphics fields that hold the text. With version 0.2.2,
 145         I've put a band-aid on this problem by reducing the field size so
 146         that it now works on 800x600 displays, but smaller displays still
 147         suffer from this problem. This is just an example of the
 148         inflexibility of certain layout issues within rEFInd.</li>
 149
 150     <li>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple
 151         image sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file,
 152         rEFInd can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the
 153         desired size would be useful.</li>
 154
 155     <li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot
 156         loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID
 157         from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's
 158         label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
 159
 160     <li>The default_selection option in refind.conf could be improved by
 161         supporting a list of default options, so that if the first item
 162         isn't found, rEFInd will try to boot the second one in the list,
 163         and so on. This could be handy in case a driver fails to load, or
 164         to provide an override in case the user inserts a specific
 165         removable disk&mdash;by placing the removable disk's name first in
 166         the list, it will take precedence over the normal hard disk
 167         default.</li>
 168
 169     <li>Along the lines of the previous item, the default_selection might
 170         be expanded to support some form of specification of disk types, as
 171         in a special entry for any optical disk or any external disk, no
 172         matter what its name is.</li>
 173
 174     <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
 175         and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
 176         boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
 177
 178     </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
 179
 180 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
 181
 182     <ul>
 183
 184     <li>I'd like to find a way to get rEFInd to launch BIOS boot loaders on
 185         UEFI-based systems. This option currently works only on
 186         Macs&mdash;or at least, I've not gotten it to work on any of my
 187         UEFI-based PCs. (I've done some experiments to try to get this to
 188         work, but so far without success. If you'd like to help on this, <a
 189         href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">e-mail me</a> for my
 190         thoughts.)</li>
 191
 192     <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
 193         Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
 194         <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
 195         This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
 196         Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
 197         parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
 198         "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
 199         firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
 200         other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
 201         mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
 202         problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
 203         to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
 204         since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
 205         EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
 206         OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
 207         implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
 208         let it go.</li>
 209
 210     <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on UEFI-based
 211         PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
 212         fixed.</li>
 213
 214     <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
 215         UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
 216         Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
 217         do it.</li>
 218
 219     <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
 220         ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
 221         This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
 222
 223     <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
 224         re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
 225         nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
 226         EFI.</li>
 227
 228     <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
 229         re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
 230         have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
 231         caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
 232         shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
 233
 234     <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
 235         similar problems.</p>
 236
 237     </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
 238
 239 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
 240
 241     <ul>
 242
 243     <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
 244         it would.</li>
 245
 246     <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
 247         BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
 248         can see how it could be for some people.</li>
 249
 250     <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
 251         whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
 252         Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
 253         understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
 254         installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
 255         See <a
 256         href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
 257         forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
 258
 259     <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
 260         boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt>
 261         file.</li>
 262
 263     <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
 264         loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
 265         change its icon.</li>
 266
 267     <li>A way to read boot options set via <tt>efibootmgr</tt>,
 268         <tt>bless</tt>, or similar options from NVRAM to add to the boot
 269         set would be useful.</li>
 270
 271     <li>A way to examine and change the NVRAM settings could be useful.
 272         This would enable a CD-based boot of rEFInd to fix a broken disk
 273         boot. Perhaps this could be done via a separate tool that could be
 274         launched much like the shell or <tt>gptsync</tt>.</li>
 275
 276     <li>I'd like to give the user the ability to set custom options on a
 277         single-boot basis, similar to what's possible in GRUB.</li>
 278
 279     <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
 280         purposes.</li>
 281
 282     <li>Going further, the ability to load arbitrary other fonts, ideally
 283         in a standard format, would be desirable for theming purposes.</li>
 284
 285     <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
 286         priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
 287         written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
 288         can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
 289
 290     </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
 291
 292     <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
 293
 294     <ul>
 295
 296     <li>The drivers I've built fail to load on a 32-bit Mac Mini; I get an
 297         "incompatible version" error message at an EFI shell, or an error
 298         code of 80000019 when rEFInd tries to load them. (These two
 299         messages are equivalent.) I suspect the problem is related to the
 300         EFI version 1.<i>x</i> used on the Mac, as opposed to UEFI
 301         2.<i>x</i> used on PCs. I'm looking into the problem. In the
 302         meantime, if you have this problem, I recommend tracking down
 303         equivalent drivers from other sources. (See the <a
 304         href="drivers.html">drivers page</a> for some pointers.) I'd
 305         appreciate <a href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">hearing from
 306         you</a> if you have problems along these lines. Please tell me what
 307         type of computer you're using, and especially the firmware version
 308         data (from rEFInd's "about" screen). This may help me narrow down
 309         the cause.</li>
 310
 311     <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are required. Given the recent
 312         shift to ext4fs, that should be the priority; however, other Linux
 313         filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
 314         additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
 315         RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
 316
 317     <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
 318         are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
 319         that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
 320         the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
 321         system that uses <a
 322         href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
 323         I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.</li>
 324
 325     <li>The driver installation procedure could be improved, perhaps by
 326         adding support for drivers to the <tt>install.sh</tt> script.</li>
 327
 328     <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
 329         what the volume's real label is.</li>
 330
 331     </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
 332
 333 </ul>
 334
 335 <hr />
 336
 337 <p>copyright &copy; 2012 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 338
 339 <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>
 340
 341 <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>
 342
 343 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 344
 345 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
 346
 347   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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