# The rEFInd Boot Manager:
The Future of rEFInd

by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com

Originally written: 3/14/2012; last Web page update: 12/15/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.7.6

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!

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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 main page.

rEFInd is far from perfect. It's based on rEFIt, which has a list of active bugs 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.

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!

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:

- Tasks with which non-programmers can help:
  - Testing! rEFIt was complex enough that changes such as the ones I've made have the potential to disrupt the program's operation in unexpected ways. Since the initial 0.2.0 release, I've continued to add features to rEFInd, and every new feature is another way for bugs to get into the program. I can only test on a handful of systems with a limited number of configurations. Therefore, if you try rEFInd and run into bugs, please report them to me!
  - rEFIt's original design, and hence rEFInd's design, enables easy theming by replacing icon files. If you'd like to design a new theme for rEFInd, feel free to submit it. I might or might not replace the icons it uses now (most of which come from the Oxygen Icons package), but I may provide links to themes on this Web site (or even host them on the project's Sourceforge page). For more information on designing themes for rEFInd, see the Theming rEFInd page.
- Improvements to existing features:
  - 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 prefer to have it scan disks and partitions, as the Mac's legacy boot support does. Also, the UEFI legacy boot code presents empty optical drives and uses generic icons rather than OS-specific icons.
  - Currently, rEFInd can detect whether it's compiled for x86 or x86-64 systems and displays this information in its "About" screen (`AboutrEFInd()` in `main.c`). I'd like to add detection for Itanium and ARM systems, but I have no way to test such changes.
  - 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.
  - A way to set the color of the font would be useful for theming purposes.
  - The program's font features could be greatly improved by enabling use of a standard font format, by enabling use of non-ASCII characters, and by enabling use of variable-width as well as monospace fonts.
  - 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.
  - Currently, if a filesystem's label comes up empty, rEFInd substitutes the size, so you get displays like `boot EFI\foo\bar.efi from 90 GiB volume`. I'd like to add more checks to substitute the GPT partition label if the filesystem label comes up empty.
  - Along the lines of the previous item, the `default_selection` 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.
  - 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).
  - 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.
- Known bugs that need squashing:
  - I've been receiving reports of blank screens when using rEFInd on some recent Mac models. I've investigated this with the help of one user, and I suspect that Apple has made changes to its firmware that are likely to affect just about any EFI program. I don't have a definitive solution, but at least one user has reported that removing rEFInd's drivers has caused the problem to go into remission.
  - The Gigabyte Hybrid EFI has a bug that causes the allegedly case-insensitive `StriCmp()` 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 parts of icon filenames) causes icons to be replaced by ugly "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 `StriCmp()` 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.
  - The Shutdown option works correctly on Macs, but not on many UEFI-based PCs. On such systems, Shutdown reboots the computer. This should be fixed.
  - The media-ejection feature (F12) should be extended to work on UEFI-based PCs and early Macs. At the moment, it relies on an Apple-specific EFI extension, and I know of no standard EFI way to do it.
  - A couple of Mac users have reported that the brightness-adjustment features in Windows don't work when Windows is booted via rEFInd, but that these features do work when Windows is booted via the Mac's built-in boot manager. Unfortunately, I have no idea what causes this problem, I have no Windows installation on my one (elderly) Mac, and I have no way to debug it. Therefore, it's unlikely that I'll be able to fix this problem myself; but if you have the equipment and skill to do so, I'd be interested in receiving a patch.
  - 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.
  - The "scanning for new boot loaders" message that appears during the re-scan feature is primitive. Some sort of dynamic icon would be nice, but perhaps impractical, given the single-tasking nature of EFI.
  - On my Mac Mini, launching a shell, returning, and performing a re-scan causes the system to be unable to launch the shell again. I have not observed this behavior on UEFI-based PCs. It seems to be caused by a truncated DevicePath to the shell, which includes the shell's pathname but not the device identifier.
  - When specifying a volume by name in `dont_scan_dirs`, slashes are converted to backslashes in the specification but not in the actual volume name read from disk. Thus, you can't specify a volume by name if it includes a slash (as in `Fedora /boot`). Workarounds are to rename the volume to omit the slash and to use a filesystem number rather than a volume label.
  - The code is in need of review to search for memory leaks and similar problems.
  - 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.
  - Some Macs experience problems with waking up from suspend states when rEFInd is installed. Unfortunately, I lack the hardware to test and experiment with this (my only Intel-based Mac doesn't exhibit this problem), so I can't fix this myself. Using `pmset` to disable the `autopoweroff` option is claimed by some to at least partially fix the problem, though.
- New features I'd like to add:
  - EFI supports network boots. rEFInd doesn't, but it would be nice if it would.
  - 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.
  - 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 if rEFInd is installed in the ESP rather than on the Mac OS X root partition. See this forum thread for more information.
  - I'd like to find a way to enable users to enter customizations for boot options and then save them to the `refind.conf` file. One possible way to implement this would be to have manual boot stanzas override auto-detected boot loader definitions for the same boot loader file.
  - 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 the NVRAM, and so on. This would be useful in system maintenance and in recovering from boot problems.
  - An installation tool for the EFI environment would be useful. A simple EFI shell script might work, but because this function requires access to the `bcfg` command, this would work only from a version 2 shell or if `bcfg` were implemented as a standalone program. Another alternative would be a program written in C.
  - It should be possible to override specific auto-detected boot loader settings—say, to disable one specific boot loader or change its icon.
  - The ability to rotate the display for users who rotate their monitors would be helpful.
  - 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.
- Improvements to the EFI drivers:
  - Drivers for additional filesystems are desirable. Only XFS and JFS are missing from the major Linux filesystems. UDF would also be a welcome addition, as might drivers for other OSes (say, for the BSDs, especially if BSD developers create a boot loader similar to Linux's EFI stub loader). Also along these lines, adding drivers for Linux LVM and RAID setups would be useful.
  - The HFS+ driver returns a volume label of "HFS+ volume", no matter what the volume's real label is.
  - 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.
  - When built with the GNU-EFI package, an attempt to load more than one driver on my 32-bit Mac Mini causes the computer to hang. I do not have this problem with 64-bit drivers on my UEFI-based computers. I don't know if this is a 32-bit issue or a Mac issue. This is not relevant if you're using my binary package, since I build it with the TianoCore EDK2, and the drivers built in that way don't exhibit this bug.
- Improvements to `gptsync`, `install.sh`, or other support tools:
  - The `gptsync` program can return misleading error codes under some circumstances, such as when it makes no changes to the partition table. Fix this.
  - 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 `install.sh` 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.
  - A Mac-specific package is highly desirable.

copyright © 2012–2013 by Roderick W. Smith

This document is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.3.

If you have problems with or comments about this Web page, please e-mail me at rodsmith@rodsbooks.com. Thanks.

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