Hi bugs@,
Newer Intel-based systems (namely 11th Generation TigerLake systems) use
the Intel "VMD" NVMe RAID controller, such as the HP Spectre x360
13t-aw200, along with the counterparts from Dell, Lenovo, Acer, et al.
I believe ThinkPads (at least jcs@'s ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen1) may not use
it, but most other TigerLake laptops sadly do, and (at least on my
Spectre) is forced on, even with Secure Boot off. My Spectre has no CSM
(although my older WhiskeyLake Spectre and work KabyLake ThinkPad do).
FreeBSD has support for it (along with Windows 10 21H1/Linux), and I
have been using it for 5+ months just fine:
https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/sys/dev/vmd
Information on Intel's website (server VMD RAID):
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-volume-management-device-overview.html
HP website stating NVMe RAID is forced on TigerLake:
https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06983517 (Dell/Lenovo/Acer have
similar pages as well)
This is unrelated to the vmd(8) hypervisor despite the common name.
Since VMD RAID is forced, I obviously cannot use the SSD on OpenBSD. We
should copy over the FreeBSD driver to OpenBSD.
Disclaimer: I am a FreeBSD Ports committer (I am nc@ in FreeBSD-land). I
work at Microsoft, but not on Windows. I DO work in the Exchange/Outlook
umbrella but neither powers @neelc.org (look at the SMTP headers).
-Neel
===
https://www.neelc.org/
