href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update:
-6/27/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.7.0</p>
+5/15/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.1</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>
+<p>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>
<table border="1">
<tr>
like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no
way to test such changes.</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>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>The <tt>default_selection</tt> option in <tt>refind.conf</tt> could
- be improved by supporting a list of default options, so that if the
- first item isn't found, rEFInd will try to boot the second one in
- the list, and so on. This could be handy in case a driver fails to
- load, or to provide an override in case the user inserts a specific
- removable disk—by placing the removable disk's name first in
- the list, it will take precedence over the normal hard disk
- default.</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
and/or initial RAM disks relative to the rEFInd directory (or the
boot loader's directory, in the case of initrds).</li>
+ <li>Currently the background for certain subscreens (such as the
+ information page or submenu listings) is a solid color based on the
+ upper-left corner of the screen. Having an option to support a
+ transparent background is desirable to some users.</li>
+
</ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
<li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
<li>The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and
similar problems.</li>
- <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array, rEFInd will detect
- kernels or boot loaders in RAID 1 twice. This could be fixed by
- adding a check for duplicate filesystem UUIDs to the
- partition-scanning code.</li>
+ <li>If the user has a Linux software RAID 1 array with Btrfs, HFS+,
+ or FAT filesystem, rEFInd will detect kernels or boot loaders in
+ RAID 1 twice. Checks to prevent this with ext2/3/4fs and ReiserFS
+ already exist; these checks could be expanded to block such
+ duplication with more filesystems.</li>
<li>Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states
when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to
<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 -->
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>
<hr />
-<p>copyright © 2012–2013 by Roderick W. Smith</p>
+<p>copyright © 2012–2014 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>