<p class="subhead">by Roderick W. Smith, <a
href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
- <p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 3/23/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.2.2</p>
+ <p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 4/19/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.2.7</p>
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-<p>rEFInd is far from perfect. It's based on rEFIt, which has a
n <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>
+<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>
<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>
uses now (most of which come from the Oxygen Icons package), but I may
provide a way to make selecting a theme from one of several installed
themes easy, and provide links to themes on this Web site (or even host
-them on the project's Sourceforge page). Note that rEFInd currently
-supports only BMP format and ICNS format graphics files, and the former
-aren't very useful for icons because they lack transparency support. ICNS
-is an Apple format, and many Mac tools support it. In Linux, you can
-convert PNG images to ICNS format by using the <a
-href="http://icns.sourceforge.net/">libicns</a> library's <tt>png2icns</tt>
-program. I'm not sure what you'd use in Windows to create ICNS files.</li>
+them on the project's Sourceforge page). For more information on designing themes for rEFInd, see the <a href="themes.html">Theming rEFInd</a> page.</li>
<li>The code could be more flexible in its handling of the sizes of various graphical elements, and particularly drawn text. Prior to version 0.2.2, submenu text was invisible on UEFI-based PCs with 800x600 and smaller displays because of an inability to properly crop the graphics fields that hold the text. With version 0.2.2, I've put a band-aid on this problem by reducing the field size so that it now works on 800x600 displays, but smaller displays still suffer from this problem. This is just an example of the inflexibility of certain layout issues within rEFInd.</li>
-<li>I want to be able to specify the volume on which a boot loader resides in <tt>refind.conf</tt>. (As it is, manually-defined options can only launch boot loader files on the same volume as rEFInd.)</li>
+<li>I'd like to add a configuration option to set the screen resolution. Many computers seem to default to 800x600, even when the hardware can handle much higher resolutions. A higher resolution would enable fitting more OS tags on the screen at once. I haven't yet looked into the system calls that would enable such changes.</li>
-<li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
+<li>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple image sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file, rEFInd can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the desired size would be useful.</li>
+
+<li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if it would.</li>
+
+<li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
-<li>I don't like the <tt>disable</tt> and <tt>hideui</tt> options in <tt>refind.conf</tt>. I'd like to replace them with a positive option listing for utilities, similar to <tt>scanfor</tt> (which in fact replaces other "hide" options in rEFIt).</li>
+<li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
<li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I can see how it could be for some people.</li>
+<li>I'd like to find a way to get rEFInd to launch BIOS boot loaders on UEFI-based systems. This option currently works only on Macs—or at least, I've not gotten it to work on any of my UEFI-based PCs.</li>
+
+<li>Returning from a program (such as an EFI shell or a boot loader that fails) produces an error message about a failure when "(re)opening our installation volume" on some computers. (Among mine, only a 32-bit Mac Mini produces this message.) In some cases, rEFInd then hangs. I don't fully understand its cause or why it doesn't appear on most systems. This needs investigating and fixing.</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. This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance: Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly "generic" ones; rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements); and boot loaders will not be detected if their filenames use uppercase <tt>.EFI</tt> extensions. Some of these problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy, since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems. OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just let it go.</li>
+
+<li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this.</li>
+
<li>The Page Up and Page Down keys work in a rather strange way—a result of an admittedly quick fix on my part to a problem with a data structure that makes implementation of scrolling harder than it ought to be.</li>
<li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.</li>
<li>A way to examine and change the NVRAM settings could be useful. This would enable a CD-based boot of rEFInd to fix a broken disk 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 find a way to get rEFInd to launch BIOS boot loaders on UEFI-based systems. This option currently works only on Macs—or at least, I've not gotten it to work on any of my UEFI-based PCs.</li>
-
<li>I'd like to find a way to have rEFInd re-scan removable media when they're inserted.</li>
<li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and similar problems.</p>