X-Git-Url: https://code.delx.au/refind/blobdiff_plain/a927c00229adc84e4c1bb4e7bd36a42726ae4bba..05d641020fe8cea57fa41b9e19459727a463d0c0:/docs/refind/drivers.html diff --git a/docs/refind/drivers.html b/docs/refind/drivers.html index 5d19efb..ffb532e 100644 --- a/docs/refind/drivers.html +++ b/docs/refind/drivers.html @@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.com
Originally written: 4/19/2012; last Web page update: -12/21/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.6.1
+1/16/2013, referencing rEFInd 0.6.5I'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!
@@ -90,14 +90,41 @@ href="mailto:rodsmith@rodsbooks.com">rodsmith@rodsbooks.comBeginning with version 0.2.7, rEFInd has been able to load EFI drivers, and as of version 0.4.0, it has shipped with some EFI filesystem drivers. Although EFI implementations should be able to load drivers prior to rEFInd's launch, in my experience, most EFI implementations offer such poor control over EFI driver loading that they can't be counted on to do this. Thus, if you want to use EFI drivers, rEFInd's ability to do so can be useful. This page tells you why you might want to use drivers, how you can install and use rEFInd's own drivers, where you can go to find other drivers, and provides tips on a few specific drivers.
+EFI supports drivers, which can activate hardware or filesystems in the pre-boot environment. At the moment, EFI drivers are few and far between; but you can or might want to use them for various reasons:
As a side note, using an ISO-9660 driver can theoretically help you keep the size of a custom Linux boot CD/DVD down to a reasonable value. This is because EFI systems normally boot from optical discs by reading a FAT image file in El Torito format and treating that file as an ESP. If you need to store the kernel both in that file and directly in the ISO-9660 filesystem (to maintain bootability on BIOS systems), that can represent an unwanted extra space requirement. Placing rEFInd and an ISO-9660 driver in the FAT image file should enable you to store the kernel on the disc only once. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in practice. When the ISO-9660 driver is loaded from the El Torito image, the driver discovers that the optical disc is in use and refuses to access it. It's possible to use EFI shell commands to give the ISO-9660 driver access to the shell device, but this causes the El Torito access to go away, which means that anything loaded from the El Torito image (such as rEFInd) is likely to malfunction. Also, some EFI implementations include ISO-9660 drivers, so you might not need a separate ISO-9660 driver if you're building a disc for a particular computer.
+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.
- +As already noted, I know of no EFI drivers for EFI hardware, aside from those that are built into motherboards' EFI implementations. I do, however, know of a few EFI filesystem drivers, in addition to those provided with rEFInd:
@@ -232,7 +261,7 @@ fs0: map -rcopyright © 2012 by Roderick W. Smith
+copyright © 2012–2013 by Roderick W. Smith
This document is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.3.