href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 4/19/2012; last Web page update:
-4/20/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.7.9</p>
+7/28/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.3</p>
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<!-- <p class="sidebar"><b>Tip:</b> Some Linux installation media come as <i>hybrid ISO</i> files, which can be written to either optical discs or USB flash drives for installation. Some of these media, though, are useless for installing to EFI systems from USB flash drives—unless your computer supports ISO-9660 on non-optical media. rEFInd's ISO-9660 driver provides this support. To use such a hybrid image from USB flash drive, you must boot using rEFInd on another disk that has the ISO-9660 driver installed. rEFInd should then provide an option to boot from the USB flash drive. I cannot guarantee that the installer will boot at this point, but it might.</p> -->
-<li>You can load a filesystem driver to gain access to files on a filesystem other than FAT (or HFS+ on Macs or ISO-9660 on some systems). This is most likely to be useful on a Linux installation, since a filesystem driver can enable you to store a Linux kernel with EFI stub loader or for use by ELILO on a Linux-native filesystem if your ESP is getting crowded.</li>
+<li>You can load a filesystem driver to gain access to files on a filesystem other than FAT (or HFS+ on Macs or ISO-9660 on some systems). This is most likely to be useful on a Linux installation, since a filesystem driver can enable you to store a Linux kernel with EFI stub loader or for use by ELILO on a Linux-native filesystem if your EFI System Partition (ESP) is getting crowded.</li>
<li>You can load a driver for a plug-in disk controller to give the EFI access to its disks. Note that this is <i>not</i> required if you place your boot loader (and perhaps your OS kernel) on another disk, or if the plug-in disk controller includes EFI-capable firmware. It could be handy, perhaps in conjunction with a filesystem driver, to enable the EFI to read a boot loader or kernel from a disk on a plug-in controller, though.</li>
<ul>
+<li><b><a href="https://github.com/pbatard/efifs">Pete Batard's efifs drivers</a></b>—This project is an EFI driver wrapper around GRUB 2's filesystem drivers. Once compiled, the result is that GRUB 2's drivers become standalone EFI filesystem drivers, loadable independently or by rEFInd. (rEFInd version 0.8.3 or later is required.) At present (early July, 2014), several drivers, including NTFS, exFAT, JFS, and XFS, are usable, albeit with some caveats. For instance, using a <tt>root=UUID={uuid-value}</tt> specification to tell a Linux kernel about its root partition doesn't work, although <tt>root=PARTUUID={guid=value}</tt> does work, as does <tt>root=/dev/sd{xy}</tt>. I have no doubt that these drivers will improve rapidly in usability in the near future.</li>
+
<li><b><a href="http://refit.sourceforge.net">rEFIt's ext2fs and ReiserFS drivers</a></b>—You can gain read-only access to ext2fs, ext3fs, and ReiserFS volumes with these drivers, originally written by Christoph Pfisterer. You can use the binaries in the <tt>refit-bin-0.14/efi/tools/drivers</tt> directory of the binary package directly on a Mac. On a UEFI-based PC, though, you'll need to break the Mac-style "fat" binary into its 32- and 64-bit components. You can use my <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/thin/index.html"><tt>thin</tt></a> program for this job. As a practical matter, there's no advantage to using these drivers over rEFInd's drivers, since the latter are updated versions of the former.</li>
<li><b><a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/cloverefiboot/">Clover EFI's ISO-9660, ext2fs, ext4fs, and HFS+ drivers</a></b>—This project is an offshoot of TianoCore, the main UEFI project. It's primarily a Hackintosh boot loader, but it includes drivers for <a href="http://cloverefiboot.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cloverefiboot/VBoxFsDxe/">ISO-9660, ext2fs, ext4fs, and HFS+;</a> however, building them requires a fair amount of expertise. These drivers served as a starting point for rEFInd's drivers, except for the ext4fs driver, which the Clover developers based on rEFInd's ext4fs driver. Thus, as with the rEFIt drivers, there's likely to be no advantage to using the Clover drivers over the rEFInd drivers.</li>