Originally written: 4/19/2012; last Web page update: -10/6/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.6
+12/5/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.5.0I'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!
@@ -160,7 +160,7 @@ href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.comAll 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 "Notes on Specific Drivers;" however, these problems are very minor on most systems.
- +If you want to use one or more of these drivers, you can install them from the rEFInd binary package from the refind/drivers_arch directory, where arch is a CPU architecture code—x64 or ia32. The files are named after the filesystems they handle, such as ext2_x64.efi for the 64-bit ext2fs driver. You should copy the files for the filesystems you want to use to the drivers or drivers_arch 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.
@@ -173,7 +173,7 @@ fs0: load reiserfs_x64.efi fs0: map -r -If you build rEFInd from source, you should be aware that the drivers rely on TianoCore's development kit, whereas rEFInd itself uses GNU-EFI. 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 BUILDING.txt 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 Getting rEFInd page for details) or use drivers from another source.
+If you build rEFInd from source, you should be aware that the drivers rely on TianoCore's development kit, whereas rEFInd itself can use either TianoCore's kit or GNU-EFI. 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 BUILDING.txt 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 Getting rEFInd page for details) or use drivers from another source.
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 Unknown. (I fixed that bug for rEFInd's version, and it wasn't present in the original rEFIt drivers.)
@@ -201,9 +203,9 @@ fs0: map -rI'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 /boot partition; however, if you're willing to use ext3fs or ReiserFS on your root (/) 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.
+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 /boot partition; however, if you're willing to use ext3fs or ReiserFS on your root (/) 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.
-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 /boot 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 /etc/fstab entry for a new UUID value, though. As noted earlier, be sure to use notail as an option in /etc/fstab for ReiserFS if you want to read it from EFI.) You can even use HFS+ on a Linux /boot partition, although this makes the most sense on a Mac, which has its own EFI HFS+ driver.
+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 /boot 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 /etc/fstab entry for a new UUID value, though. As noted earlier, be sure to use notail as an option in /etc/fstab for ReiserFS if you want to read it from EFI.) You can even use HFS+ on a Linux /boot 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 /boot partition and not deal with drivers at all. Mounting your ESP at /boot is a practical solution for many users.
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.