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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 12/16/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.6.0</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>The code could be more flexible in its handling of the sizes of
149 various graphical elements, and particularly drawn text. Prior to
150 version 0.2.2, submenu text was invisible on UEFI-based PCs with
151 800x600 and smaller displays because of an inability to properly
152 crop the graphics fields that hold the text. With version 0.2.2,
153 I've put a band-aid on this problem by reducing the field size so
154 that it now works on 800x600 displays, but smaller displays still
155 suffer from this problem. This is just an example of the
156 inflexibility of certain layout issues within rEFInd.</li>
157
158 <li>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple
159 image sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file,
160 rEFInd can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the
161 desired size would be useful.</li>
162
163 <li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot
164 loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID
165 from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's
166 label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
167
168 <li>The default_selection option in refind.conf could be improved by
169 supporting a list of default options, so that if the first item
170 isn't found, rEFInd will try to boot the second one in the list,
171 and so on. This could be handy in case a driver fails to load, or
172 to provide an override in case the user inserts a specific
173 removable disk&mdash;by placing the removable disk's name first in
174 the list, it will take precedence over the normal hard disk
175 default.</li>
176
177 <li>Along the lines of the previous item, the default_selection might
178 be expanded to support some form of specification of disk types, as
179 in a special entry for any optical disk or any external disk, no
180 matter what its name is.</li>
181
182 <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
183 and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
184 boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
185
186 <li>Various options (<tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>, <tt>also_scan_dirs</tt>,
187 <tt>scan_driver_dirs</tt>, etc.) refer to directories or files,
188 either on the ESP or on all partitions. A way to identify specific
189 partitions for these options would be useful in some
190 situations.</li>
191
192 </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
193
194 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
195
196 <ul>
197
198 <li>When in Secure Boot mode, rEFInd can launch just one driver that's
199 signed with a shim key or MOK. The second and later drivers
200 generate "access denied" errors. <!-- I think this is because of
201 the fast-and-loose sample code I borrowed from shim, which re-uses
202 rEFInd's own image handle (the <tt>image_handle</tt> variable in
203 <tt>start_image()</tt>) for launching shim/MOK-signed binaries. The
204 result is that when the second driver is loaded, it can't register
205 itself with the firmware because the firmware believes it's already
206 been registered. The solution is likely to involve creating a child
207 image handle rather than re-using rEFInd's own image handle, but
208 this is likely to be tedious to do&mdash;see
209 <tt>/usr/local/UDK2010/MyWorkSpace/MdeModulePkg/Core/Dxe/Image/Image.c</tt>
210 for the reference UEFI implementation. --> </li>
211
212 <li>When setting a resolution higher than about 800x600 (or maybe even
213 640x480) in text mode, the text displayed by rEFInd, and on some
214 systems shells and other programs launched from rEFInd, is
215 restricted to an 80x24-character area in the top-left corner of the
216 screen.</li>
217
218 <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
219 Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
220 <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
221 This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
222 Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
223 parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
224 "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
225 firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
226 other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
227 mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
228 problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
229 to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
230 since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
231 EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
232 OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
233 implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
234 let it go.</li>
235
236 <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on UEFI-based
237 PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
238 fixed.</li>
239
240 <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
241 UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
242 Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
243 do it.</li>
244
245 <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
246 ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
247 This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
248
249 <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
250 re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
251 nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
252 EFI.</li>
253
254 <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
255 re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
256 have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
257 caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
258 shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
259
260 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
261 similar problems.</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>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
292 loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
293 change its icon.</li>
294
295 <li>A way to read boot options set via <tt>efibootmgr</tt>,
296 <tt>bless</tt>, or similar options from NVRAM to add to the boot
297 set would be useful.</li>
298
299 <li>A way to examine and change the NVRAM settings could be useful.
300 This would enable a CD-based boot of rEFInd to fix a broken disk
301 boot. Perhaps this could be done via a separate tool that could be
302 launched much like the shell or <tt>gptsync</tt>.</li>
303
304 <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
305 purposes.</li>
306
307 <li>Going further, the ability to load arbitrary other fonts, ideally
308 in a standard format, would be desirable for theming purposes.</li>
309
310 <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
311 priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
312 written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
313 can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
314
315 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
316
317 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
318
319 <ul>
320
321 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Given the talk of
322 shifting to Btrfs, that should be the priority; however, other
323 Linux filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
324 additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
325 RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
326
327 <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
328 are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
329 that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
330 the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
331 system that uses <a
332 href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
333 I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.</li>
334
335 <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
336 what the volume's real label is.</li>
337
338 <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
339 to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
340 desirable.</li>
341
342 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
343
344 </ul>
345
346 <hr />
347
348 <p>copyright &copy; 2012 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
349
350 <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>
351
352 <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>
353
354 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
355
356 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
357
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