<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: 4/14/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.2.6</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>
<hr />
-<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>
<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>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>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>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>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.) This <i>seems to be</i> harmless, but I haven't removed the error message because I don't fully understand its cause or why it doesn't appear on most systems. This needs investigating and fixing.</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>