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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:
-2/1/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.5</p>
+9/13/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.9.1</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
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
receiving a patch.</li>
<li>If you use a true MBR disk on a Mac to boot Windows or some other
- BIOS-only OS, and if that disk has an extended partition, that
- partition may show up in rEFInd as a bootable FAT partition. The
- reason is twofold: FAT doesn't contain a simple "magic" signature
- like most filesystems, so it's easy to misidentify something else
- as FAT; and it's hard to positively identify boot code vs. other
- random data.</li>
+ BIOS-only OS, and if that disk has an extended partition, bogus
+ additional BIOS/legacy-bootable options may appear in the rEFInd
+ menu. The reason appears to be a bug in the handling of
+ extended/logical partitions in the <tt>refind/lib.c</tt> file, but
+ I haven't fully tracked it down.</li>
<li>The re-scan feature occasionally produces odd results, such as
ignoring new media or keeping old media that have been ejected.
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 -->
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
<hr />
-<p>copyright © 2012–2014 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
+<p>copyright © 2012–2015 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
<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>