Menu

New filesystem driver package under development

2014-06-29
2014-08-11
  • Roderick W. Smith

    I've recently been in correspondence with Pete Batard, who's been working on a new set of EFI filesystem drivers. His approach is to create wrapper code to turn the GRUB 2 drivers into EFI drivers, without requiring changes to the GRUB 2 code. So far he's gotten the NTFS driver to work, and there's a strong possibility that others will become usable in the not-too-distant future. I'm writing this message simply to give a heads-up to rEFInd users, since new drivers may be of interest to this community.

    Currently, the new drivers are source-only, and there's a rEFInd bug that prevents them from loading properly from rEFInd. I plan to fix the rEFInd bug with the next release. In the meantime, you can try the NTFS driver if you're comfortable with git and building software. You can get the package from Pete's github page:

    https://github.com/pbatard/efifs

     
  • Pete Batard

    Pete Batard - 2014-06-29

    Or, if you don't want to build it yourself, you can also download the binary version of the read-only NTFS EFI driver at:

    http://efi.akeo.ie

    I'll try to update this page with more binary downloads and updated versions as they become available...

     
    • Pete Batard

      Pete Batard - 2014-07-01

      I have now added binaries for exFAT and XFS drivers, along with an updated version of the NTFS driver, at the link above.

       

      Last edit: Pete Batard 2014-07-01
  • Roderick W. Smith

    I'd like to point out that Pete's made rapid and significant progress on his driver set. At last count, his project compiles 17 filesystem drivers, including all the major Linux-native filesystems, HFS+, exFAT, NTFS, ZFS, and UDF. I haven't tested them all, and I know of a few bugs that I've reported to Pete, but these can be usable on many systems. Thus, if you've got a little time and would like to help out, I urge people to give them a try. (Caveat: They're drivers. If they fail, they could lock up your computer. Thus, it's best to load them manually or from a secondary installation of rEFInd, to ease recovery in case they fail badly.)

     

Log in to post a comment.