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<h1>The rEFInd Boot Manager:<br />The Future of rEFInd</h1>
href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
-2/8/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.8.6</p>
+11/8/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.10.0</p>
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<ul>
+ <li>As described in reference to version 0.9.2 on the <a
+ href="revisions.html">Revisions</a> page, rEFInd includes a
+ delicate and hackish workaround to a problem introduced by Shim
+ 0.8. Developing a better solution to that problem is a high
+ priority.</li>
+
<li>The support for booting legacy (BIOS) OSes on UEFI-based PCs
currently has a number of limitations. Most importantly, it works
off of the list of boot devices stored in the computer's NVRAM. I'd
optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific
icons.</li>
- <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86
- or <i>x</i>86-64 systems and displays this information in its
- "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
- like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
- way to test such changes.</li>
+ <li>rEFInd's <tt>Makefile</tt>s and, to a lesser extent, C code,
+ support <i>x</i>86, <i>x</i>86-64, and ARM64 CPUs. EFI is also
+ available for Itanium (IA-64) and ARM32 CPUs, so I'd like to add
+ this support.</li>
+
+ <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86,
+ <i>x</i>86-64, or ARM64 systems and displays this information in
+ its "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
+ like to add detection for Itanium and 32-bit ARM systems, but I
+ have no way to test such changes.</li>
<li>Further to the preceding, rEFInd's GPT-scanning code (used to
extract partition names) includes assumptions about byte order, and
removing rEFInd's drivers has caused the problem to go into
remission.</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
+ <li>Some EFIs have bugs that cause 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
"generic" ones; and 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). 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>
+ mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). This problem is
+ worse when compiling rEFInd with GNU-EFI than with Tianocore.
+ Version 0.9.1 has made improvements on this score, but some issues
+ may continue to lurk.</li>
<li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based
PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
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'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, but my
- understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
- installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
- See <a
- href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
- forum thread</a> for more information.</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.
One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
actions would enable use of rEFInd on tablet computers that lack
complete keyboards.</li>
+ <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
+ monitors or who use tablets would be helpful.</li>
+
<li>GRUB provides a configuration-file command called <tt>outb</tt>
that enables manipulating hardware registers. Something similar,
via the <tt>mm</tt> command, can be done in the EFI shell. I'd like
loader settings—say, to disable one specific boot loader or
change its icon.</li>
- <li>The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their
- monitors would be helpful.</li>
-
- <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
- priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
- 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 GUI configuration tool for host OSes (Linux, OS X, Windows, etc.)
+ would be nice, but it's low on my personal priority list. If you'd
+ like to contribute, I prefer something written in a cross-platform
+ GUI toolkit, so that a single code base can be used on any of the
+ major OSes.</li>
</ul></li> <!-- New features -->
</ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
-<li><b>Improvements to <tt>gptsync</tt>, <tt>install.sh</tt>, or other
+<li><b>Improvements to <tt>gptsync</tt>, <tt>refind-install</tt>, or other
support tools:</b>
<ul>
under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the
partition table. Fix this.</li>
- <li>When updating a system with Secure Boot via an RPM or Debian
- package, the RPM installation script can detect rEFInd's existing
- shim or PreLoader program and pass options to <tt>install.sh</tt>
- to try to copy these programs over themselves. This results in a
- message that the copy was over the same file and an error message
- that there were problems with the installation, although this isn't
- really the case.</li>
-
<li>rEFInd's support for network booting is primitive and relies on the
external iPXE package. In my own testing, iPXE retrieves the
BIOS-mode boot loader from some servers that offer both, which