[INTERNAL] List of rufus-4.12 enhancements and fixes

[pbatard]

This topic is flagged as INTERNAL and is therefore NOT open for comments.

Medium Term

• on 24H2, USB Device Tree Viewer v4.4+ can show the actual USB 3 5/10/20G speed, and we sure want to be able to do the same in Rufus. How do they do it, knowing that Microsoft have not provided IOCTL_USB_GET_NODE_CONNECTION_INFORMATION_EX_V3?
• We get way too many device list refreshes after creating a blank UEFI:NTFS drive.
• We're going to have to take matters in our own hands when it comes to the buggy AMI NTFS driver and forcefully prevent the non UEFI:NTFS partition to boot when md5sum validation is applied...
• Windows installer corrupts the backup GPT of the installer drive?!? What the hell?!? → Seen when installing Win11 and shutting down the machine after the installer bails out on the 59fd550 issue
• Icon for check hash is not converted to dark mode (doesn't use the same color scheme as the toolbar icons) → Nah, we're good
• [6a1c2b4] CA 2023 use is not reported in WUE log summary
• [56b4b9f] We shouldn't report security violations when the bootloader is unsigned (Arch 2024)
• [10694ae] See if we can get the issuer CA without going through CertGetCertificateChain(), to avoid CRL/OSCP connections when Windows is building the chain. This could help with users panicking, like they did in Rufus uses the Internet without permission! #2781.
• Add a cron script to rufus-web to check for SBAT updates
• [af58b1c] Could we do something better for the projected size computation? We've got multiple reports of people using 8 G%B drives where the 25H2 does not fit... Test by creating a 7.22 GB VHDX against Win11_25H2_EnglishInternational_x64.iso.
• [05526d4] It doesn't look like cluster sizes below 4096 are accepted for NTFS (at least with 25H2 and on a < 8GB drive)
• We should really disable BIOS/Legacy mode for Windows 11...
• [9d074f8] Can we force refresh the landscape after we zero the MBR/GPT to try to keep interfering applications (and Windows) off our back?
• There's a GRUB 2.14 RC1 (and also, Ubuntu 25.10 is reporting a 2.14 version for GRUB even as it's not been released yet).
• Don't forget to remove the grub-2.14 symlink to RC1 in rufus-web when 2.14 is released!
• [6a7fb93] Update UEFI:NTFS to latest
• Do we want to bother creating El-Torito bootable images when saving as ISO? This would first require mapping the El-Torito images for Windows UDF ISOs like we do for ISO-9660... → Nah
• [a8c745d] Ever since we switched to VS rather than MinGW, and because we now use UPX against the MS executables, it removes the indication that we have a debug PDB, which means we can no longer debug from data dumps! We need to revert to using uncompressed executables before we package them for the store, or else we won't be able to analyse crashes!

Long Term No Rush

• There's an f3probe on Linux to detect fake drives. Could we pick up on it for Rufus?
• Ultimately, we probably want to replace all mentions of ISO Mode with FST Mode...
• Do we have an issue unloading old UEFI:NTFS drivers (and have Google secretly been using our NTFS drivers in their Chromebooks)? → Needs more data... which we don't have!
• Add a .esp image copy mode?
• Is there any way we can make the regular MSVC exe behave the same as the App Store one? Even as it's the same executable binary, the App Store version is a lot less forgiving about exceptions and at any rate, you'd expect the standard MSVC binary to report stuff like access violations, especially when debugging in VS, yet it doesn't...
• The case of tails and its early write-error unless you zero the drive first... And now the case of Windows complaining that it needs a restart when you write a UEFI bootloader.
• Should we try to remove volume drive letter while saving to VHD just to be safe? We do lock the physical drive, but Windows being Windows, we may still have some bad surprises there...
• What on earth does one have to do to fix the device dropdown not displaying on startup issue?!? → Dammit, now this has moved to the Drive Properties label sometimes not being displayed
• Async/double buffering improvements for ISO mode
• Use VDS for GetDrivePartitionData() and use this opportunity to call on IVdsVolumeMF_GetFileSystemProperties() to get the file systems. Or we might switch to using WMI as Microsoft advises and create our own C++ wmi library interface. (Except WMI won't for Win7 users...)
• Also we should use VDS to query data for label sanitization
• Detect GPT that is smaller than disk size and ask user "Do you want to fix this?"
• Add support for .json provided custom commands to apply after the image has been created. e.g. something like:

{
  "commands": [
    {
      "image": "en_windows_7_ultimate_with_sp1_x86_dvd_619077.iso",
      "source_dir": "C:/my_dir/",
      "custom_var1": "SOME_VAR",
      "command": "my_command.exe some_flags %custom_var1% some_more_flags"
    }
  ]
}

• We don't detect Ubuntu ARM64 as Linux images where persistence can be enabled. We may want to change that.
• UI should be disabled during port cycle until we detect the cycled device again (with timeout in case the user yanked the device)
• Label changed by the user should not revert to ISO label once the drive has been created.