[OmniOS-discuss] OmniOS r151020: Setup won't see my NVMe disk

[Dan McDonald]

> On Mar 23, 2017, at 11:20 AM, Arne <mailing-list-omnios at kopierkatze.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> Thanks for creating the updated ISO. I can now mount that disc to the IPMI's virtual drive, which is a lot more convenient!
> "prtconf -v" and "prtconf -vp" also work fine now.

Good!

> Unfortunately I am unable to capture their output. I tried several ways:
> 
> a) Network. Problem: The OmniOS installer won't recognize my Intel X550 10G network card.

We *have* support for X550.  ESPECIALLY in bloody. I wonder what happened?

> b) Serial-over-LAN. Problem: I can see everything including the OmniOS installer bootloader, but afterwards serial output stops. There seems to be no option to enable serial console output for the main installer!?

There is, but it involves interacting with Loader.  Menu option #5 on the loader screen can dink with that.  Basically, you have to boot OmniOS mentioning console-output on the command line.

> c) USB stick. Problem: How to identify the USB stick in the installer shell? There is no "rmformat" to identify the device. "ls -l /dev/rdsk/c*0" only showed the CD-ROM.
> The USB stick will probably not work at all because there is no XHCI support in the installer, I guess.

There is XHCI support in the bloody installer.  It was part of the bloody update last week.  There's still one fixed-but-not-yet-pushed bug, but that shouldn't affect USB sticks... at least I think it shouldn't.

> Anyway, I just ran "devfsadm -C" and I saw this output:
> "nvme0: NVMe spec version 1.2"

Aha.

> This suggests that the SSD is indeed a NVM 1.2 SSD. :-(
> But I still did not find a proper datasheet or any (Linux, ...) tool to identify the NVMe level.
> 
> What are your plans to support NVMe 1.2?

We can override the NVMe settings to support 1.2 devices, but we can't support all of the 1.2 improvements (e.g. namespaces).  Colleague Dale Ghent, who's spent time both in ixgbe (he put X550 support into illumos and therefore OmniOS) and NVMe can speak more, but I don't think he'll disagree with anything I've said here.

The big question to my mind is whether or not we should just support NVMe 1.2 devices out of the box (and out of the Installer ISO).

Dan