href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 4/19/2012; last Web page update:
-10/6/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.6</p>
+11/15/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.7</p>
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<p>All of these drivers rely on filesystem wrapper code written by rEFIt's author, Christoph Phisterer. They all suffer from speed problems on some systems, as described later in <a href="#notes">"Notes on Specific Drivers;"</a> however, these problems are very minor on most systems.</p>
-<p class="sidebar"><b>Note:</b> rEFInd's <tt>install.sh</tt> script does not
currently install drivers; however, if you installed manually, you may have already installed rEFInd's drivers. See the <a href="installing.html">Installing rEFInd</a> page for details.</p>
+<p class="sidebar"><b>Note:</b> rEFInd's <tt>install.sh</tt> script does not
install drivers by default. It does if you pass it the <tt>--drivers</tt> option, though. If you installed manually, you may also have installed rEFInd's drivers. See the <a href="installing.html">Installing rEFInd</a> page for details.</p>
<p>If you want to use one or more of these drivers, you can install them from the rEFInd binary package from the <tt>refind/drivers_<tt class="variable">arch</tt></tt> directory, where <tt class="variable">arch</tt> is a CPU architecture code—<tt>x64</tt> or <tt>ia32</tt>. The files are named after the filesystems they handle, such as <tt>ext2_x64.efi</tt> for the 64-bit ext2fs driver. You should copy the files for the filesystems you want to use to the <tt>drivers</tt> or <tt>drivers_<tt class="variable">arch</tt></tt> subdirectory of the main rEFInd installation directory. (You may need to create this subdirectory.) Be careful to install drivers only for your own architecture. Attempting to load drivers for the wrong CPU type will cause a small delay at best, or may cause the computer to crash at worst. I've placed rEFInd's drivers in directories that are named to minimize this risk, but you should exercise care when copying driver files.</p>
fs0: <tt class="userinput">map -r</tt>
</pre>
-<p>If you build rEFInd from source, you should be aware that the drivers rely on <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/tianocore/">TianoCore's development kit,</a> whereas rEFInd itself
uses <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnu-efi/">GNU-EFI.</a> Thus, to compile both, you'll need to install both development kits. Unfortunately, the TianoCore kit is a bit unusual from a Linux developer's perspective, and you'll probably have to build it from source code. Consult the <tt>BUILDING.txt</tt> file in the source package for more information. None of this is important if you use a binary build of rEFInd, unless you've obtained it from a third party who hasn't built the drivers. If that's the case, you'll have to download rEFInd from Sourceforge (see the <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html">Getting rEFInd page</a> for details) or use drivers from another source.</p>
+<p>If you build rEFInd from source, you should be aware that the drivers rely on <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/tianocore/">TianoCore's development kit,</a> whereas rEFInd itself
can use either TianoCore's kit or <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnu-efi/">GNU-EFI.</a> Thus, to compile both, you'll need to install TianoCore, with GNU-EFI being optional but providing no additional benefits. Unfortunately, the TianoCore kit is a bit unusual from a Linux developer's perspective, and you'll probably have to build it from source code. Consult the <tt>BUILDING.txt</tt> file in the source package for more information. None of this is important if you use a binary build of rEFInd, unless you've obtained it from a third party who hasn't built the drivers. If that's the case, you'll have to download rEFInd from Sourceforge (see the <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html">Getting rEFInd page</a> for details) or use drivers from another source.</p>
<h2>Finding Additional EFI Drivers</h2>
<ul>
-<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. 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.</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.</li>
<li><b><a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/cloverefiboot/">Clover EFI's ISO-9660, ext2fs, 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, and HFS+;</a> however, building them requires a fair amount of expertise. These drivers served as a starting point for rEFInd's drivers.</li>
<li><b><a href="https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Devices/EFI/Firmware2/VBoxPkg/VBoxFsDxe">VirtualBox's HFS+ and ISO-9660 drivers</a></b>—These drivers are available in source code form, and come with VirtualBox binaries. I've not attempted to compile them myself, but I've seen a report that suggests they may include assumptions that require use of <a href="http://www.mingw.org/">MinGW,</a> a GCC-based compiler for Windows (and cross-compiler to build Windows executables under Linux). I don't know of a source for binaries suitable for use on EFI-based computers; if you want to use them, you'll need to figure out how to compile them yourself.</li>
+<li><b>Ext2Pkg</b>—This driver, based on <a href="https://bitbucket.org/alinrus/ext2pkg">bitbucket</a> and with a backup on <a href="https://github.com/the-ridikulus-rat/Tianocore_Ext2Pkg">github,</a> appears to be an ext2fs/ext3fs driver built independently of the driver written by Christoph Pfisterer. The linked-to sites provide access to source code via <tt>git</tt> but do not provide binaries. When I built binaries, they failed to work. Under VirtualBox, the driver loaded but then hung when I tried to access an ext2 filesystem. On a 32-bit Mac Mini, I got error messages when I tried to access an ext2 filesystem. As I write, the code was last updated in March of 2012. If you check the project and it's been updated more recently, it might be worth trying. Otherwise, I can't recommend this driver. I mention it here only in case it improves in the future.</li>
+
</ul>
<p>Most of these cross-project drivers appear to be related, and most of them have fed into rEFInd's drivers. I used the Clover package, which in turn was based on the VirtualBox drivers, as a starting point. Everybody else has dropped rEFIt's original ReiserFS driver, but I added that back. Of these drivers, only the Clover EFI Tools NTFS driver is missing from rEFInd. Specific versions can have their own quirks, though. For instance, the Clover (and I suspect VirtualBox) drivers don't return volume labels, which causes rEFInd to display loaders on those volumes as being on a disk called <tt>Unknown</tt>. (I fixed that bug for rEFInd's version, and it wasn't present in the original rEFIt drivers.)</p>
<h2>Notes on Specific Drivers</h2>
</a>
-<p>I've tested several of the drivers described on this page on a handful of systems. The ext2fs driver (from any source) works on both ext2fs and ext3fs, but not on ext4fs—at least, not in my one test. (There may be options you can use when creating an ext4 filesystem that would enable the ext2fs driver to handle it, but if so I don't know what they are.) The ReiserFS driver is obviously useful only on ReiserFS partitions. (Reiser4 is not supported, as far as I know.) Given that these filesystems are getting a bit on in age by Linux standards, you might do well to use them on a separate Linux <tt>/boot</tt> partition; however, if you're willing to use ext3fs or ReiserFS on your root (<tt>/</tt>) filesystem, you can use the EFI drivers to read your kernel from it. Note that this assumes you use conventional partitions; to the best of my knowledge, there's no EFI driver for Linux's Logical Volume Manager (LVM) or Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) configurations, so the EFI can't access filesystems stored in these ways.</p>
+<p>I've tested several of the drivers described on this page on a handful of systems. The Pfisterer ext2fs driver (from any source) works on both ext2fs and ext3fs, but not on ext4fs—at least, not in my one test. (There may be options you can use when creating an ext4 filesystem that would enable the ext2fs driver to handle it, but if so I don't know what they are.) The ReiserFS driver is obviously useful only on ReiserFS partitions. (Reiser4 is not supported, as far as I know.) Given that these filesystems are getting a bit on in age by Linux standards, you might do well to use them on a separate Linux <tt>/boot</tt> partition; however, if you're willing to use ext3fs or ReiserFS on your root (<tt>/</tt>) filesystem, you can use the EFI drivers to read your kernel from it. Note that this assumes you use conventional partitions; to the best of my knowledge, there's no EFI driver for Linux's Logical Volume Manager (LVM) or Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) configurations, so the EFI can't access filesystems stored in these ways.</p>
-<p>The ext2fs and ReiserFS drivers work, but they are a bit sluggish—particularly the ext2fs driver. The extent of the problem depends on the computer. In my tests so far, VirtualBox has fared the worst. On it, loading a Linux kernel with EFI stub loader from a FAT partition takes 2 seconds, from the moment of selecting the OS in rEFInd to the moment the kernel messages begin to appear. The equivalent time using ReiserFS or HFS+ is 20 seconds, and with ext2fs it's 200 seconds (that is, 3 minutes and 20 seconds). On a 32-bit Mac Mini, though, the speed problem is much less pronounced—my kernel loads in just 3 seconds from a ReiserFS partition and in 13 seconds from an ext2 filesystem. Speeds were similar with my newest computer, an ASUS P8H77-I board. Times with ext2fs on a UEFI PC with an Intel motherboard are in the 2–4 second range. If you try the ext2fs driver and it seems to hang, be patient; it may finally boot up. If so, and if the delay is too great for you to accept, you might consider using ReiserFS instead of ext2fs or ext3fs, at least if a change is practical. (For a <tt>/boot</tt> partition, it almost certainly is practical; you can back it up quite easily, create a fresh filesystem on it, and restore it. You may need to adjust your <tt>/etc/fstab</tt> entry for a new UUID value, though. As noted earlier, be sure to use <tt>notail</tt> as an option in <tt>/etc/fstab</tt> for ReiserFS if you want to read it from EFI.) You can even use HFS+ on a Linux <tt>/boot</tt> partition, although this makes the most sense on a Mac, which has its own EFI HFS+ driver.</p>
+<p>The Pfisterer ext2fs and ReiserFS drivers work, but they are a bit sluggish—particularly the ext2fs driver. The extent of the problem depends on the computer. In my tests so far, VirtualBox has fared the worst. On it, loading a Linux kernel with EFI stub loader from a FAT partition takes 2 seconds, from the moment of selecting the OS in rEFInd to the moment the kernel messages begin to appear. The equivalent time using ReiserFS or HFS+ is 20 seconds, and with ext2fs it's 200 seconds (that is, 3 minutes and 20 seconds). On a 32-bit Mac Mini, though, the speed problem is much less pronounced—my kernel loads in just 3 seconds from a ReiserFS partition and in 13 seconds from an ext2 filesystem. Speeds were similar with my newest computer, an ASUS P8H77-I board. Times with ext2fs on a UEFI PC with an Intel motherboard are in the 2–4 second range. If you try the ext2fs driver and it seems to hang, be patient; it may finally boot up. If so, and if the delay is too great for you to accept, you might consider using ReiserFS instead of ext2fs or ext3fs, at least if a change is practical. (For a <tt>/boot</tt> partition, it almost certainly is practical; you can back it up quite easily, create a fresh filesystem on it, and restore it. You may need to adjust your <tt>/etc/fstab</tt> entry for a new UUID value, though. As noted earlier, be sure to use <tt>notail</tt> as an option in <tt>/etc/fstab</tt> for ReiserFS if you want to read it from EFI.) You can even use HFS+ on a Linux <tt>/boot</tt> partition, although this makes the most sense on a Mac, which has its own EFI HFS+ driver. Of course, you can also create a FAT <tt>/boot</tt> partition and not deal with drivers at all. Mounting your ESP at <tt>/boot</tt> is a practical solution for many users.</p>
<p>Since the ext2fs and ReiserFS drivers share a common origin, it should come as no surprise that they perform in much the same way no matter which version (rEFIt, Clover, or rEFInd) you use. The NTFS driver from the Clover Tools package is nice and speedy, so if for some reason you need to place a boot loader on an NTFS volume, this driver might be worth tracking down.</p>