code.delx.au - refind/blob - docs/refind/todo.html

   1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
   2 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
   3   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
   4
   5 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
   6 <head>
   7   <title>The rEFInd Boot Manager: The Future of rEFInd</title>
   8   <link href="../Styles/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
   9 </head>
  10
  11 <body>
  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 11/6/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.7</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>
  22
  23 <table border="1">
  24 <tr>
  25 <td>Donate $1.00</td>
  26 <td>Donate $2.50</td>
  27 <td>Donate $5.00</td>
  28 <td>Donate $10.00</td>
  29 <td>Donate another value</td>
  30 </tr>
  31 <tr>
  32 <td><form name="_xclick" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  33 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
  34 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
  35 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
  36 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
  37 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="1.00">
  38 <input type="image" src="http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
  39 </form>
  40
  41 </td>
  42 <td><form name="_xclick" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  43 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
  44 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
  45 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
  46 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
  47 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="2.50">
  48 <input type="image" src="http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
  49 </form>
  50
  51 </td>
  52 <td><form name="_xclick" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  53 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
  54 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
  55 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
  56 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
  57 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="5.00">
  58 <input type="image" src="http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
  59 </form>
  60
  61 </td>
  62 <td><form name="_xclick" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  63 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
  64 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
  65 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
  66 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
  67 <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="10.00">
  68 <input type="image" src="http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
  69 </form>
  70
  71 </td>
  72 <td>
  73 <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
  74 <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations">
  75 <input type="hidden" name="business" value="rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">
  76 <input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">
  77 <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="0">
  78 <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
  79 <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="rEFInd Boot Manager">
  80 <input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF:btn_donate_LG.gif:NonHostedGuest">
  81 <input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
  82 <img alt="Donate with PayPal" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
  83 </form>
  84 </td></tr>
  85 </table>
  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>The support for booting legacy (BIOS) OSes on UEFI-based PCs
 135         currently has a number of limitations. Most importantly, it works
 136         off of the list of boot devices stored in the computer's NVRAM. I'd
 137         prefer to have it scan disks and partitions, as the Mac's legacy
 138         boot support does. Also, the UEFI legacy boot code presents empty
 139         optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific
 140         icons.</li>
 141
 142     <li>Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for <i>x</i>86
 143         or <i>x</i>86-64 systems and displays this information in its
 144         "About" screen (<tt>AboutrEFInd()</tt> in <tt>main.c</tt>). I'd
 145         like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
 146         way to test such changes.</li>
 147
 148     <li>The code could be more flexible in its handling of the sizes of
 149         various graphical elements, and particularly drawn text. Prior to
 150         version 0.2.2, submenu text was invisible on UEFI-based PCs with
 151         800x600 and smaller displays because of an inability to properly
 152         crop the graphics fields that hold the text. With version 0.2.2,
 153         I've put a band-aid on this problem by reducing the field size so
 154         that it now works on 800x600 displays, but smaller displays still
 155         suffer from this problem. This is just an example of the
 156         inflexibility of certain layout issues within rEFInd.</li>
 157
 158     <li>Although the ICNS file format used by rEFInd supports multiple
 159         image sizes, if a size that rEFInd needs isn't present in the file,
 160         rEFInd can't use the icon. The ability to scale images to the
 161         desired size would be useful.</li>
 162
 163     <li>I would like to be able to specify the volume on which a boot
 164         loader resides using a partition GUID value, but extracting a GUID
 165         from the partition data is harder than extracting the volume's
 166         label or counting up the filesystem numbers.</li>
 167
 168     <li>The default_selection option in refind.conf could be improved by
 169         supporting a list of default options, so that if the first item
 170         isn't found, rEFInd will try to boot the second one in the list,
 171         and so on. This could be handy in case a driver fails to load, or
 172         to provide an override in case the user inserts a specific
 173         removable disk&mdash;by placing the removable disk's name first in
 174         the list, it will take precedence over the normal hard disk
 175         default.</li>
 176
 177     <li>Along the lines of the previous item, the default_selection might
 178         be expanded to support some form of specification of disk types, as
 179         in a special entry for any optical disk or any external disk, no
 180         matter what its name is.</li>
 181
 182     <li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
 183         and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
 184         boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
 185
 186     <li>Various options (<tt>dont_scan_dirs</tt>, <tt>also_scan_dirs</tt>,
 187         <tt>scan_driver_dirs</tt>, etc.) refer to directories or files,
 188         either on the ESP or on all partitions. A way to identify specific
 189         partitions for these options would be useful in some
 190         situations.</li>
 191
 192     </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
 193
 194 <li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
 195
 196     <ul>
 197
 198     <li>The <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte
 199         Hybrid EFI</a> has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive
 200         <tt>StriCmp()</tt> function to perform a case-sensitive comparison.
 201         This causes any number of bugs in file matching. For instance:
 202         Changing the case of icon filename extensions (or various other
 203         parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly
 204         "generic" ones; and rEFInd sometimes appears in its own menu (the
 205         firmware sometimes returns an all-caps version of the filename, but
 206         other times returns the filename with the correct case, causing a
 207         mismatch if the path includes lowercase elements). Some of these
 208         problems can be overcome by converting both strings to be compared
 209         to one case before doing the comparison, but others aren't so easy,
 210         since I think <tt>StriCmp()</tt> is being called internally to the
 211         EFI. In any event, it'd be nice to fix some of these problems.
 212         OTOH, this is a workaround for a bug on just one EFI
 213         implementation, and a dismal one at that, so I'm inclined to just
 214         let it go.</li>
 215
 216     <li>The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on UEFI-based
 217         PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be
 218         fixed.</li>
 219
 220     <li>The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on
 221         UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an
 222         Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to
 223         do it.</li>
 224
 225     <li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
 226         ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
 227         This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
 228
 229     <li>The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the
 230         re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be
 231         nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of
 232         EFI.</li>
 233
 234     <li>On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a
 235         re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I
 236         have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be
 237         caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the
 238         shell's pathname but not the device identifier.</li>
 239
 240     <li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
 241         similar problems.</li>
 242
 243     </ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
 244
 245 <li><b>New features I'd like to add:</b>
 246
 247     <ul>
 248
 249     <li>With the arrival of PCs preloaded with Windows 8 and with Secure
 250         Boot enabled, some way to cope is in order. I'm thinking of adding
 251         code to limit or prohibit booting of unsigned boot loaders if
 252         rEFInd detects that Secure Boot is active, and link with the <a
 253         href="http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/18945.html">Shim</a>
 254         pre-bootloader to help handle signing and authentication. I need to
 255         research the technical details more, though.</li>
 256
 257     <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
 258         it would.</li>
 259
 260     <li>There's currently no way to create a manual boot stanza for a
 261         BIOS-booted OS. This isn't a big priority for me personally, but I
 262         can see how it could be for some people.</li>
 263
 264     <li>I've received queries about rEFInd's ability to work with Apple's
 265         whole-disk encryption scheme that's new with OS X 10.7.
 266         Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test this, but my
 267         understanding is that it will work correctly <i>if</i> rEFInd is
 268         installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition.
 269         See <a
 270         href="https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/5c7d0195/">this
 271         forum thread</a> for more information.</li>
 272
 273     <li>I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for
 274         boot options and then save them to the <tt>refind.conf</tt> file.
 275         One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot
 276         stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
 277         boot loader file.</li>
 278
 279     <li>It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot
 280         loader settings&mdash;say, to disable one specific boot loader or
 281         change its icon.</li>
 282
 283     <li>A way to read boot options set via <tt>efibootmgr</tt>,
 284         <tt>bless</tt>, or similar options from NVRAM to add to the boot
 285         set would be useful.</li>
 286
 287     <li>A way to examine and change the NVRAM settings could be useful.
 288         This would enable a CD-based boot of rEFInd to fix a broken disk
 289         boot. Perhaps this could be done via a separate tool that could be
 290         launched much like the shell or <tt>gptsync</tt>.</li>
 291
 292     <li>I'd like to give the user the ability to set custom options on a
 293         single-boot basis, similar to what's possible in GRUB.</li>
 294
 295     <li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
 296         purposes.</li>
 297
 298     <li>Going further, the ability to load arbitrary other fonts, ideally
 299         in a standard format, would be desirable for theming purposes.</li>
 300
 301     <li>A GUI configuration tool would be nice, but it's low on my personal
 302         priority list. If you'd like to contribute, I prefer something
 303         written in a cross-platform GUI toolkit, so that a single code base
 304         can be used on any of the major OSes.</li>
 305
 306     <li>A way to "source" one configuration file from another one would be
 307         helpful for some types of configuration scripts. (This would enable
 308         overriding options in a secondary file without modifying the
 309         default original file, for instance.)</li>
 310
 311     </ul></li> <!-- New features -->
 312
 313     <li><b>Improvements to the EFI drivers:</b>
 314
 315     <ul>
 316
 317     <li>Drivers for additional filesystems are required. Given the recent
 318         shift to ext4fs, that should be the priority; however, other Linux
 319         filesystems, UDF, and perhaps others would all be welcome
 320         additions. Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and
 321         RAID setups would be useful, too.</li>
 322
 323     <li>As detailed on the <a href="drivers.html">drivers page,</a> there
 324         are performance issues with the drivers on some systems. I suspect
 325         that most "real" computers aren't greatly affected (in my tests,
 326         the problem is worst with VirtualBox, and the next worst is a
 327         system that uses <a
 328         href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/">DUET</a>). Nonetheless,
 329         I'd like to track down the cause and fix it.</li>
 330
 331     <li>The driver installation procedure could be improved, perhaps by
 332         adding support for drivers to the <tt>install.sh</tt> script.</li>
 333
 334     <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
 335         what the volume's real label is.</li>
 336
 337     <li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
 338         to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
 339         desirable.</li>
 340
 341     </ul></li> <!-- Drivers -->
 342
 343 </ul>
 344
 345 <hr />
 346
 347 <p>copyright &copy; 2012 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
 348
 349 <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>
 350
 351 <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>
 352
 353 <p><a href="index.html">Go to the main rEFInd page</a></p>
 354
 355 <p><a href="using.html">Learn about problems with and the future of rEFInd</a></p>
 356
 357   <p><a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/">Return</a> to my main Web page.</p>
 358 </body>
 359 </html>