href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com</a></p>
<p>Originally written: 4/19/2012; last Web page update:
-5/4/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.0</p>
+2/1/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.5</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>
mainly because it compiled cleanly with no extra work, aside from
providing a Makefile entry for it.</li>
+<li><b>NTFS</b>—Samuel Liao contributed this driver, which uses the
+ rEFIt/rEFInd driver framework. My own testing of it is limited, but it
+ does work for me. Note that this driver is <i><b>not</b></i> required
+ to boot Windows with rEFInd, since Windows stores its EFI boot loader
+ on the (FAT) ESP, and the BIOS boot process (generally used when
+ dual-booting on a Mac) relies only on the partition's boot sector,
+ which is read without the benefit of this driver. You might use this
+ driver if you want to store large boot files, such as EFI-accessible
+ RAM disk images, from Windows. Also, if you have NTFS data partitions
+ on a Mac, loading this driver should exclude them from the boot menu;
+ and you should see NTFS volume names in the boot menu on a Mac if you
+ load this driver.</li>
+
</ul>
<p>All of these drivers rely on filesystem wrapper code written by rEFIt's author, Christoph Phisterer.</p>
-<p class="sidebar"><b>Note:</b> rEFInd's <tt>install.sh</tt> script
does not install drivers by default on OS X, but on Linux, it installs the driver required to read the <tt>/boot</tt> directory, if one is available. The script installs all the available drivers if you pass it the <tt>--drivers</tt> option. 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
, when run from Linux, installs the driver required to read the <tt>/boot</tt> directory. Under OS X, the <tt>install.sh</tt> script installs the ext4fs driver if the script detects a Linux partition—but you might need to change this driver if you use another filesystem. The script installs all the available drivers if you pass it the <tt>--alldrivers</tt> option. (I do <i>not</i> recommend using this feature except for creating general-purpose USB flash drives with rEFInd, since having too many drivers can cause various problems.) 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>ext4_x64.efi</tt> for the 64-bit ext4fs 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>
<ul>
+<li><b><a href="http://efi.akeo.ie">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 (driver version 0.7; January 2015), several drivers, including NTFS, exFAT, ext2fs, ReiserFS, Btrfs, JFS, and XFS, are usable, albeit with some caveats. Some drivers are slow, and they hang on some computers, such as one of my Macs. I have no doubt that these drivers will improve rapidly in usability in the near future. Note that the ext2fs driver from this set works with ext3fs and ext4fs, too. In addition to the main link, you can check the <a href="https://github.com/pbatard/efifs">github repository</a> for the source code.</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>
</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.) Most of these drivers also suffer from speed problems on some computers. This is worst with the ext2fs drivers under VirtualBox; on my main computer, that combination takes 3 minutes to load a Linux kernel and initial RAM disk file! Most real computers don't suffer nearly so badly, but some can take an extra five seconds or so to boot a kernel. I've fixed the speed problems in rEFInd's drivers as of version 0.7.0.</p>
-
-<p>Driver availability could increase in the future. Source code to a wide variety of filesystems is available in GRUB Legacy, GRUB 2, Linux, various BSD kernels, and in other projects. Sooner or later somebody's likely to begin porting those drivers to EFI. If you do so, or if you know of additional EFI drivers, please <a href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">tell me about it,</a> so I can share the information here. Likewise if you know of a source for other EFI drivers—say, for a video card or disk controller card.</p>
+<p>The rEFIt, Clover, and VirtualBox drivers are related, and all of them
+have fed into rEFInd's drivers. 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.)
+Most of these drivers also suffer from speed problems on some computers.
+This is worst with the ext2fs drivers under VirtualBox; on my main
+computer, that combination takes 3 minutes to load a Linux kernel and
+initial RAM disk file! Most real computers don't suffer nearly so badly,
+but some can take an extra five seconds or so to boot a kernel. I've fixed
+the speed problems in rEFInd's drivers as of version 0.7.0.</p>
+
+<p>Driver availability could increase in the future. If you know of
+additional EFI drivers, please <a href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">tell
+me about them,</a> so I can share the information here. Likewise if you
+know of a source for other EFI drivers—say, for a video card or disk
+controller card.</p>
<p>Once you've obtained an EFI driver, you can install it in rEFInd just as you would install rEFInd's own drivers, as described earlier.</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 Pfisterer ext2fs driver (from any source) works on both ext2fs and ext3fs, but not on ext4fs—but Agner's derivative ext4fs driver handles ext4fs, so that's not a problem. The ReiserFS driver is obviously useful only on ReiserFS partitions. (Reiser4 is not supported, as far as I know.) The Btrfs driver is the newest of the lot, and so I've tested it the least, but it's worked for me on two test systems. Given that ext2fs, ext3fs, and ReiserFS 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, ext4fs, Btrfs, 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>As noted earlier, rEFInd's drivers prior to version 0.7.0, as well as related drivers from rEFIt, Clover, and VirtualBox, suffer from speed problems. These problems are mostly minor, adding a second or two to boot times; but on some computers, the speed problems can be dramatic, boosting kernel-load times up to as much as three minutes (under VirtualBox). If you run into excessive boot times with such a driver, try switching to the latest rEFInd driver instead.</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—but Agner's derivative ext4fs
+driver handles ext4fs, so that's not a problem. The ReiserFS driver is
+obviously useful only on ReiserFS partitions. (Reiser4 is not supported, as
+far as I know.) The Btrfs driver is the newest of the Linux filesystem
+drivers included with rEFInd, and so I've tested it the least, but it's
+worked for me on several test systems. Given that ext2fs, ext3fs, and
+ReiserFS 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, ext4fs, Btrfs, 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>As noted earlier, rEFInd's drivers prior to version 0.7.0, as well as related drivers from rEFIt, Clover, and VirtualBox, suffer from speed problems. These problems are mostly minor, adding a second or two to boot times; but on some computers, the speed problems can be dramatic, boosting kernel-load times up to as much as three minutes (under VirtualBox). If you run into excessive boot times with such a driver, try switching to the latest rEFInd driver instead. You might also try Pete Batard's efifs drivers.</p>
<p>Although ext2fs, ext3fs, ext4fs, and ReiserFS are all case-sensitive, these drivers treat them in a case-insensitive way. Symbolic links work; however, rEFInd 0.6.11 and later ignore symbolic links, since many distributions use them in a way that creates redundant or non-functional entries in the rEFInd menu. You should be able to use hard links if you want to use a single kernel file in multiple ways (say for two distributions).</p>