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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 3/4/2016, referencing rEFInd 0.10.5</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 rEFInd.)
254 I've heard that this problem affects not just rEFInd, but also GRUB,
255 and even Windows when dual-booting on a Mac; see <a
256 href="https://youtu.be/tgTMxB-ffjM?t=3m44s">this YouTube video</a>
257 and <a
258 href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/866920/limited-resolution-booting-with-refind-on-imac-5k">This
259 AskUbuntu question and answers,</a> for instance.</li>
260
261 <li>Some EFIs have bugs that cause the allegedly case-insensitive
262 <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
263 This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
264 Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
265 parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
266 "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
267 firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
268 other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
269 mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). This problem is
270 worse when compiling rEFInd with GNU-EFI than with Tianocore.
271 Version 0.9.1 has made improvements on this score, but some issues
272 may continue to lurk.</li>
273
274 <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
275 PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
276 fixed.</li>
277
278 <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
279 UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
280 Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
281 do it.</li>
282
283 <li>A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment
284 features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd,
285 but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the
286 Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what
287 causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one
288 (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's
289 unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you
290 have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
291 receiving a patch.</li>
292
293 <li>If you use a true MBR disk on a Mac to boot Windows or some other
294 BIOS-only OS, and if that disk has an extended partition, bogus
295 additional BIOS/legacy-bootable options may appear in the rEFInd
296 menu. The reason appears to be a bug in the handling of
297 extended/logical partitions in the <tt>refind/lib.c</tt> file, but
298 I haven't fully tracked it down.</li>
299
300 <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
301 ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
302 This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
303
304 <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
305 re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
306 nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
307 EFI.</li>
308
309 <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
310 re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
311 have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
312 caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
313 shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
314
315 <li>When specifying a volume by name in <tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>,
316 slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not
317 in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a
318 volume by name if it includes a slash (as in <tt>Fedora
319 /boot</tt>). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash
320 and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.</li>
321
322 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
323 similar problems.</li>
324
325 <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array with Btrfs, HFS+,
326 or FAT filesystem, rEFInd will detect kernels or boot loaders in
327 RAID 1 twice. Checks to prevent this with ext2/3/4fs and ReiserFS
328 already exist; these checks could be expanded to block such
329 duplication with more filesystems.</li>
330
331 <li>Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states
332 when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to
333 test and experiment with this (my only Intel-based Mac doesn't
334 exhibit this problem), so I can't fix this myself. <a
335 href="apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91139/why-does-my-mbp-sleep-on-mountain-lion-and-often-not-wake-up/91150#91150">Using
336 <tt>pmset</tt> to disable the <tt>autopoweroff</tt> option</a> is
337 <a
338 href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91529/macbook-air-not-waking-up-from-suspend-sleep-with-refind-boot-manager-installed">claimed
339 by some</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though. Using
340 the <tt>--ownhfs</tt> installation option may also help in some
341 cases.</li>
342
343 <li>If you activate BIOS-mode support on UEFI-based PCs, you may find
344 multiple copies of the BIOS-mode loaders added to your firmware's
345 boot manager. Only one copy shows up in rEFInd, though.</li>
346
347 </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
348
349 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
350
351 <ul>
352
353 <li>Currently, debugging rEFInd requires adding <tt>Print()</tt>
354 statements to the code. Adding a logging facility that supports
355 multiple log levels and writes the output to a file would help with
356 debugging, especially when dealing with problem reports from
357 users.</li>
358
359 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
360 boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
361 One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
362 stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
363 boot loader file.</li>
364
365 <li>Along similar lines, some users have asked for a way to take
366 detected boot programs and create a set of manual boot stanzas for
367 them, so that they can be modified manually.</li>
368
369 <li>Better support for touchscreens and/or configurable buttons for
370 rEFInd's actions would enable use of rEFInd on tablet computers that
371 lack complete keyboards. (Version 0.10.4 supports <i>some</i>
372 touchscreens, but this feature relies on support in the firmware,
373 which is not universally present.)</li>
374
375 <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
376 monitors or who use tablets would be helpful.</li>
377
378 <li>GRUB provides a configuration-file command called <tt>outb</tt>
379 that enables manipulating hardware registers. Something similar,
380 via the <tt>mm</tt> command, can be done in the EFI shell. I'd like
381 to add such a feature to rEFInd, since it enables doing things like
382 disabling one or another video output on Macs with two video
383 cards.</li>
384
385 <li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
386 information utility&mdash;something to tell you about your hard
387 disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
388 the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance
389 and in recovering from boot problems.</li>
390
391 <li>An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful.
392 A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function
393 requires access to the <tt>bcfg</tt> command, this would work
394 only from a version 2 shell or if <tt>bcfg</tt> were implemented
395 as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program
396 written in C.</li>
397
398 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
399 loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
400 change its icon.</li>
401
402 <li>A GUI configuration tool for host OSes (Linux, OS X, Windows, etc.)
403 would be nice, but it's low on my personal priority list. If you'd
404 like to contribute, I prefer something written in a cross-platform
405 GUI toolkit, so that a single code base can be used on any of the
406 major OSes.</li>
407
408 <li>The ability to produce audio output (at least a simple "beep") to signal
409 to visually impaired users when rEFInd is ready to accept input would be
410 helpful.</li>
411
412 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
413 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
414 can see how it could be for some people.</li>
415
416 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
417
418 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
419
420 <ul>
421
422 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Only XFS and JFS
423 are missing from the major Linux filesystems. UDF would also be a
424 welcome addition, as might drivers for other OSes (say, for the
425 BSDs, especially if BSD developers create a boot loader similar to
426 Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers
427 for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.</li>
428
429 <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
430 to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
431 desirable.</li>
432
433 <li>When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than
434 one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do
435 <i>not</i> have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based
436 computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue.
437 This is <i>not</i> relevant if you're using my binary package,
438 since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in
439 that way don't exhibit this bug.</li>
440
441 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
442
443 <li><b>Improvements to <tt>gptsync</tt>, <tt>refind-install</tt>, or other
444 support tools:</b>
445
446 <ul>
447
448 <li>The <tt>gptsync</tt> program can return misleading error codes
449 under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the
450 partition table. Fix this.</li>
451
452 <li>rEFInd's support for network booting is primitive and relies on the
453 external iPXE package. In my own testing, iPXE retrieves the
454 BIOS-mode boot loader from some servers that offer both, which
455 makes it useless on those networks.</li>
456
457 <li>A Mac-specific package is highly desirable.</li>
458
459 </ul></li>
460
461 </ul>
462
463 <hr />
464
465 <p>copyright &copy; 2012&ndash;2016 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
466
467 <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>
468
469 <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>
470
471 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
472
473 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
474
475 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
476 </body>
477 </html>