OmniOS r151020: Setup won't see my NVMe disk

[Arne]

Hi everyone!

I am currently trying to setup a nice little file server for home use.
I intend to evaluate OmniOS as the operating system, but I have some trouble installing it onto an NVMe SSD.

My hardware setup:
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5
Memory: Crucial 64GB (4x 16GB), DDR4-2133, ECC
Mainboard: Supermicro X11SSH-CTF
System Disk: Intel SSD 600p 256GB, M.2 PCIe (=NVMe)

To run the OmniOS installer, I had to install a SATA optical drive and enable legacy USB mouse/keyboard support in the BIOS (the XHCI controller of my mainboard is not supported by OmniOS).
Now I am stuck at the next problem: The OmniOS installer is not able to see my NVMe disk.

Under Linux I can see the SSD, it shows up as "/dev/nvme0n1", showing 256GB capacity.
The OmniOS installer gives me the following error message: "OmniOS cannot be installed on any disk"



I used the ISO image of OmniOS v11 r151020 (current stable).
AFAIK, this should already contain an NVMe driver, so I am a little bit surprised, why it won't see my disk.

Any hints what I am missing?

Thank you!

Arne

 

[dswartz]

Is this a 1.2 NVME drive? If so, the illumos driver only supports up to 1.1

 

[gea]

The installer of OmniOS 151020 is not capable to install to blockdevices like NVMe
(while I doubt this makes sense as the boot disk is not performance relevant)

You can try 151021 (bloody). This is the base for next long term stable (151022 around june)
This one comes with a new installer that may be capable to install to NVMe
Bloody may also support your USB3 (nearly ready for Ilumos)

NVMe 1.2 is currently not supported (on the way for Illumos) - may work if you disable version check in nvme.conf

 

[Arne]

Thanks for your responses!

According to the specs I found, this is an NVMe 1.1 drive, so there is no NVMe 1.2 incompatibility problem.

FYI, I just asked the exact same question in the OmniOS mailing list, and the guys over there came to the same conclusion as gea:
r151020 is not able to install on NVMe devices.

I just tried r151021 (bloody), but I did not have any luck either, it would not find my disk.

The reason why I want to install on the NVMe disk: I don't want to waste any of my SATA or SAS ports. The board has 8 SATA and 8 SAS ports which I want to use for HDDs.
I don't care that much about performance for the system disk, but I prefer NVMe because it does not use any port, it is rather cheap (~100 US$ for 256 GB) and small (mounted directly to the mainboard).