href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
-4/20/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.7.9</p>
+12/8/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.4</p>
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like to add detection for Itanium and 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
+ so will work only on little-endian CPUs such as the x86 and
+ x86-64.</li>
+
<li>A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming
purposes.</li>
characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as
monospace fonts.</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>Currently, if a filesystem's label comes up empty, rEFInd
- substitutes the size, so you get displays like <tt>boot
- EFI\foo\bar.efi from 90 GiB volume</tt>. I'd like to add more
- checks to substitute the GPT <i>partition</i> label if the
- <i>filesystem</i> label comes up empty.</li>
-
- <li>Along the lines of the previous item, the
- <tt>default_selection</tt> might be expanded to support some form
- of specification of disk types, as in a special entry for any
+ <li>The <tt>default_selection</tt> might be expanded to support some
+ form of specification of disk types, as in a special entry for any
optical disk or any external disk, no matter what its name is.</li>
<li>It would be useful to be able to specify paths to boot loaders
upper-left corner of the screen. Having an option to support a
transparent background is desirable to some users.</li>
- </ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
+ <li>When delivering rEFInd as a boot loader from a network server,
+ rEFInd is limited to its default options and can boot only local
+ OSes, not network OSes. The cause is that the server delivers a
+ single file, so rEFInd is divorced from its configuration and
+ support files.</li>
+
+</ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
<li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
<tt>pmset</tt> to disable the <tt>autopoweroff</tt> option</a> is
<a
href="http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/91529/macbook-air-not-waking-up-from-suspend-sleep-with-refind-boot-manager-installed">claimed
- by some</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though.</li>
+ by some</a> to at least partially fix the problem, though. Using
+ the <tt>--ownhfs</tt> installation option may also help in some
+ cases.</li>
+
+ <li>If you activate BIOS-mode support on UEFI-based PCs, you may find
+ multiple copies of the BIOS-mode loaders added to your firmware's
+ boot manager. Only one copy shows up in rEFInd, though.</li>
</ul></li> <!-- Known bugs -->
<ul>
- <li>EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if
- it would.</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>
stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same
boot loader file.</li>
+ <li>Along similar lines, some users have asked for a way to take
+ detected boot programs and create a set of manual boot stanzas for
+ them, so that they can be modified manually.</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
+ to add such a feature to rEFInd, since it enables doing things like
+ disabling one or another video output on Macs with two video
+ cards.</li>
+
<li>I have thoughts about creating an EFI configuration tool and
information utility—something to tell you about your hard
disks, enable you to manage MOKs, adjust boot loader priority in
Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers
for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.</li>
- <li>The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter
- what the volume's real label is.</li>
-
<li>This may not be possible, or it may require a new driver, but a way
to have the drivers access files (like a Linux loopback mount) is
desirable.</li>
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
+ makes it useless on those networks.</li>
+
<li>A Mac-specific package is highly desirable.</li>
</ul></li>