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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:
-12/8/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.4</p>
+7/26/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.9.0</p>
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single file, so rEFInd is divorced from its configuration and
support files.</li>
+ <li>A way to identify specific Windows versions and present unique
+ icons or change the text is desirable. Currently, a crude
+ distinction of XP and earlier vs. Vista and later is possible for
+ BIOS-booting on Macs, but no such distinction is made for EFI-mode
+ booting, and nothing finer-grained is attempted. Improvements will
+ probably require identifying unique features of each version's boot
+ loader files or boot sector code.</li>
+
</ul></li> <!-- Improvements -->
<li><b>Known bugs that need squashing:</b>
have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in
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, 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.
This should be investigated and fixed.</li>
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
detected boot programs and create a set of manual boot stanzas for
them, so that they can be modified manually.</li>
+ <li>Support for touchscreens and/or configurable buttons for rEFInd's
+ 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>