VROC in Asus Z11PA-U12 "hijacks" NVMe

[der_pepe]

Does anybody has this same issue?

Any U.2 drive connected directly into the Oculink ports of the z11pa-u12 won't appear in the NVMe list drive, but a standard NVMe in the M.2 port does, so they cannot be used as passthrough in ESXi

I suspect is due Intel VMD "hijacking" any compatible NVMe SSDs plugged into the Oculink port, in this case a couple of Intel P4610, making them only available as a VROC devices, and appears there's no possibility of disable VMD in the current BIOS version (6901)

(Although, this only happens when the CSM support is disabled. That's when it loads the VMD VROC module 8.0.0.4006 instead of the 6.3.0.1005 OPROM which is loaded in legacy mode)

I've been looking into the Ceacent adapters (since the MB doesn't support bifurcation)
being talked about in [thread].

Could using one of this adapters, bypass the VMD and make them available as standard devices?

Thanks!

 

[RolloZ170]

i see socket configuration->IIO config->Intel VMD technology
all VMD is diabled by default.

 

[der_pepe]

Thanks for your reply @RolloZ170, I saw the setting on the AMIBCP, but even if its setting is "Show: Yes" there's no trace of it in the actual setup (tried reflashing/load defaults to no avail), so maybe it's hidden somehow or is a BIOS bug?

 

[RolloZ170]

if they are catched by VMD enabled you see the drives as VMD volume in BIOS.