But it is awesome that there is community of people who are interesting enough in this stuff to find these things out.
or they ship with coreboot which can have final linux kernel payload without shims or kexec.
even if you populate a pcie card with nvme drives a lot of platforms won't let you boot from it.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43915500
And see my comment with examples of edits below that.
"An analysis of the F16f firmware using UEFITool reveals the inclusion of the NVMe DXE trifecta (Nvme, NvmeSmm, NVMEINT13), which is essential for booting from NVMe drives, like M.2."
"The motherboard features one SATA III and five SATA II connectors for storage, explaining its initial lack of support for booting from NVMe drives. Nonetheless, users can employ M.2 to PCIe adapters, allowing M.2 drives to connect with the motherboard via its expansion ports."
The article says NVMe before it says M.2 for every sentence where M.2 is mentioned. Every time, it's using M.2 as an example of NVMe storage. Given M.2 is the most common format most consumers experience for NVMe storage, this seems sensible.
This criticism seems like it's intended for a different article that didn't make the effort to be clear. This one made the effort.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250506143644/https://www.tomsh...
Here are the NEW sentences again, for convenience:
"Notably, Gigabyte has seemingly updated the 13-year-old B75M-D3H motherboard to support booting from NVMe SSDs, like M.2 SSDs, a previously unavailable functionality."
"An analysis of the F16f firmware using UEFITool reveals the inclusion of the NVMe DXE trifecta (Nvme, NvmeSmm, NVMEINT13), which is essential for booting from NVMe drives, like M.2."
"The motherboard features one SATA III and five SATA II connectors for storage, explaining its initial lack of support for booting from NVMe drives. Nonetheless, users can employ M.2 to PCIe adapters, allowing M.2 drives to connect with the motherboard via its expansion ports."
And here are the OLD:
"Notably, Gigabyte has seemingly updated the 13-year-old B75M-D3H motherboard to support booting from M.2 NVMe SSDs, a previously unavailable functionality."
"An analysis of the F16f firmware using UEFITool reveals the inclusion of the NVMe DXE trifecta (Nvme, NvmeSmm, NVMEINT13), which is essential for booting from M.2 drives."
"The motherboard features one SATA III and five SATA II connectors for storage, explaining its initial lack of support for booting from M.2 drives."
(It works perfectly to this day.)
It's a little sad that Supermicro didn't do this at their end, it's maybe an hour of work, two with testing…
> inclusion of the NVMe DXE trifecta (Nvme, NvmeSmm, NVMEINT13)
Now that I think about it, this sounds very much like what I threw into the X9DR7-LN4F BIOS image.
Ed.: apparently these are the files I used, though I cannot dig up how or where I did this :)
-rw-r--r-- 1 41917 May 28 2020 P-X9DR7-E-LN4F_BIOS_3_3_release_notes.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 30493975 May 28 2020 FD12LITE.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 16293994 May 28 2020 Aptio_V_AMI_Firmware_Update_Utility.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 818096 May 28 2020 UEFI_Shell_Spec_2_0.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 2104626 May 28 2020 AMIBCP 4.53.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 5910147 May 28 2020 UEFITool_v0.27.0.rar
-rw-r--r-- 1 10665 May 28 2020 NvmExpressDxe_4.rar
-rw-r--r-- 1 404236 May 28 2020 MMTool 4.50.0.23.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 6150536 May 28 2020 Aptio_4_AMI_Firmware_Update_Utility.zip
..A.... 20832 2018-04-18 00:00 NvmExpressDxe_4.ffsFrankenstein motherboards direct from Shenzhen with recycled parts and features that didn't exist at the time that allow me to strip out high core count Xeons and max-capacity ECC DIMMs from servers being tossed at work and shove them in standard mATX/ATX motherboards in tiny quiet cases at home for my homelab.
Plus, the recyclers add in NVMe boot support (and M.2 slots) at the factory!
big desktop cooler for example Corsair A115 can cool 250W TDP under 40db
for sandy bridge XEONS - 2/3 of CPUs were under 100 w TDP, all of them were under 150W TDP
People recommend the machinist brand motherboards. I've had good experience with the Killrser (typo) brand.
At the prices you see it seems too good to be true but those xeon CPU/motherboard/ram kits are the real deal. It's mind blowing buying a Xeon processor for the price of a cup of coffee.
If you live in an area with low electricity costs, or a cold climate where the computer ends up heating your house it's a hell of a deal.
Check out YouTube for reviews and gaming benchmarks on these systems too.
This was to enable a screamer of a Hackintosh based on Mavericks which didn't have native NVMe support at the time.
> PCIe AHCI
…AHCI is the SATA controller standard, how and why did they put in extra effort to make it not work?!? (I'm not questioning they did in fact break it, it's in line with other dumb things HW vendors do… just… ugh!)
PCIe AHCI have the controller on the m.2 device, maybe better than sata speeds? But I think to boot from an unexpected AHCI controller you might need a boot rom? And why would you put a boot rom on a device that's all about storage?
The whole point of AHCI was that you wouldn't need a boot ROM. You already have firmware support for talking to an AHCI controller to find drives and locate an operating system, because that's how the system boots off the built-in SATA ports. The firmware modules required to do the same with an AHCI add-in card are the firmware modules you're already using, so the add-in card doesn't need to bring them along in an option ROM. Same for drivers in the OS.
Most likely, the motherboards in question simply never implemented code to probe for any other AHCI devices beyond the built-in one, and would have been equally unable to boot from an AHCI controller card providing more SATA ports.
but you need to have usb flashdrive connected for long time, like 5 minutes or so, after powerup, without leds blinking so it can be scary / confusing.
fat32 formatted drive.
I'm not sure any of this is possible nowadays, I'm assuming a modified BIOS/UEFI image would be rejected due to missing some vendor signature…
(I think it was this one: https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/howto-get-full-nvme-suppor... Also praise be to Level1Techs and ArchiveTeam I think for rescuing it along with the rest of Win-Raid)
I have been using CloverBootloader for years.
Im not sure about initializing twice problem, sounds more like FUD to me. it is possible to leave computer as is for next kernel even with "whole memory allocation intact". maybe problem for "soft restart", but not for using linux as bootloader providing NVME boot capability usecase.
you can literally tell linux kernel - make my cpu XYZ look like cpu ABC... and everything works fine. [this was possible even before AI chatbots were a thing (ai joke sorry)]
There's the 504MB or 2GB limit that was removed by using EZ-Drive, and the 8GB limit that was removed by using EZ-BIOS.
I only looked into this because I had to upgrade the video card (NVidia's drivers go obsolete way before the hardware), and the new video card wouldn't post without a new BIOS. Gigabyte had issed one even though the motherboard was ten years old. I thought about going the NVME route, but didn't bother. The video card higher priority.
I even ran stable diffusion on a machine like that one, but a few years newer (with a covid-era video card).
I wouldn't be surprised if this was 100% by accident.
https://tachytelic.net/2021/12/dell-optiplex-7010-pcie-nvme/
https://tachytelic.net/2022/02/dell-optiplex-790-990-nvme/?a...
fithisux•19h ago
The end user is hostage.
We talk about AI/smartphones whatever
but the devices are not open or smart.
doublerabbit•18h ago
claudex•17h ago