href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
-11/6/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.7</p>
+12/16/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.6.0</p>
<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>
<ul>
+ <li>When in Secure Boot mode, rEFInd can launch just one driver that's
+ signed with a shim key or MOK. The second and later drivers
+ generate "access denied" errors. <!-- I think this is because of
+ the fast-and-loose sample code I borrowed from shim, which re-uses
+ rEFInd's own image handle (the <tt>image_handle</tt> variable in
+ <tt>start_image()</tt>) for launching shim/MOK-signed binaries. The
+ result is that when the second driver is loaded, it can't register
+ itself with the firmware because the firmware believes it's already
+ been registered. The solution is likely to involve creating a child
+ image handle rather than re-using rEFInd's own image handle, but
+ this is likely to be tedious to do—see
+ <tt>/usr/local/UDK2010/MyWorkSpace/MdeModulePkg/Core/Dxe/Image/Image.c</tt>
+ for the reference UEFI implementation. --> </li>
+
+ <li>When setting a resolution higher than about 800x600 (or maybe even
+ 640x480) in text mode, the text displayed by rEFInd, and on some
+ systems shells and other programs launched from rEFInd, is
+ restricted to an 80x24-character area in the top-left corner of the
+ screen.</li>
+
<li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
<tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
<ul>
- <li>With the arrival of PCs preloaded with Windows 8 and with Secure
- Boot enabled, some way to cope is in order. I'm thinking of adding
- code to limit or prohibit booting of unsigned boot loaders if
- rEFInd detects that Secure Boot is active, and link with the <a
- href="http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/18945.html">Shim</a>
- pre-bootloader to help handle signing and authentication. I need to
- research the technical details more, though.</li>
-
<li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
it would.</li>
boot. Perhaps this could be done via a separate tool that could be
launched much like the shell or <tt>gptsync</tt>.</li>
- <li>I'd like to give the user the ability to set custom options on a
- single-boot basis, similar to what's possible in GRUB.</li>
-
<li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
purposes.</li>
written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
- <li>A way to "source" one configuration file from another one would be
- helpful for some types of configuration scripts. (This would enable
- overriding options in a secondary file without modifying the
- default original file, for instance.)</li>
-
</ul></li> <!-- New features -->
<li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
<ul>
- <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are required. Given the recent
- shift to ext4fs, that should be the priority; however, other Linux
- filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
+ <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Given the talk of
+ shifting to Btrfs, that should be the priority; however, other
+ Linux filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>