You can load a driver for a plug-in network card to enable the computer to boot from the network, or to access the network without booting an OS.

I've received one report of the NVMe driver from Clover being useful to boot from an aftermarket NVMe disk on a Mac, for instance. 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. Note that this is not 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.

You can load a driver for a plug-in disk controller to give the EFI access to its disks.

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.

You can load a filesystem driver to gain access to files on a filesystem other than FAT (or HFS+ or APFS on Macs or ISO-9660 on some systems).

At the moment, EFI drivers are few and far between but you can or might want to use them for various reasons: Why Should You Use EFI Drivers?ĮFI supports drivers, which can activate hardware or filesystems in the pre-boot environment. I have not tested this feature, so I don't know how well it works. Note: The Linux efibootmgr tool provides an option, -r, that enables it to install EFI drivers rather than EFI boot loader binaries. 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. Thus, if you want to use EFI drivers, rEFInd's ability to do so can be useful.

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.

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