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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 6/21/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.3</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 32-bit build of rEFInd displays corrupted volume labels for
235 filesystems handled by built-in drivers, but not for the drivers
236 provided with rEFInd. This is presumably related to the 32-bit
237 driver bug noted below.</li>
238
239 <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
240 similar problems.</li>
241
242 </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
243
244 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
245
246 <ul>
247
248 <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
249 it would.</li>
250
251 <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
252 BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
253 can see how it could be for some people.</li>
254
255 <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
256 whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
257 Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
258 understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
259 installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
260 See <a
261 href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
262 forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
263
264 <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
265 boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt>
266 file.</li>
267
268 <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
269 loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
270 change its icon.</li>
271
272 <li>A way to read boot options set via <tt>efibootmgr</tt>,
273 <tt>bless</tt>, or similar options from NVRAM to add to the boot
274 set would be useful.</li>
275
276 <li>A way to examine and change the NVRAM settings could be useful.
277 This would enable a CD-based boot of rEFInd to fix a broken disk
278 boot. Perhaps this could be done via a separate tool that could be
279 launched much like the shell or <tt>gptsync</tt>.</li>
280
281 <li>I'd like to give the user the ability to set custom options on a
282 single-boot basis, similar to what's possible in GRUB.</li>
283
284 <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
285 purposes.</li>
286
287 <li>Going further, the ability to load arbitrary other fonts, ideally
288 in a standard format, would be desirable for theming purposes.</li>
289
290 <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
291 priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
292 written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
293 can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
294
295 </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
296
297 <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
298
299 <ul>
300
301 <li>The 32-bit versions of the drivers return filesystem labels that
302 omit the first two characters of the name. If the name is shorter
303 than two characters, the driver may return the wrong volume's
304 label. The 64-bit builds seem to be unaffected by this bug.</li>
305
306 <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are required. Given the recent
307 shift to ext4fs, that should be the priority; however, other Linux
308 filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
309 additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
310 RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
311
312 <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
313 are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
314 that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
315 the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
316 system that uses <a
317 href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
318 I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.</li>
319
320 <li>The driver installation procedure could be improved, perhaps by
321 adding support for drivers to the <tt>install.sh</tt> script.</li>
322
323 <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
324 what the volume's real label is.</li>
325
326 </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
327
328 </ul>
329
330 <hr />
331
332 <p>copyright &copy; 2012 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
333
334 <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>
335
336 <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>
337
338 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
339
340 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
341
342 <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
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