On Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 01:47:30PM -0700, Neel Chauhan wrote:
> 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)

Peter Hansteen has an ASUS machine with this too, ASUS have a similar
page, but he was able to find a BIOS menu option to disable it and
passthrough the real NVMe controller. See his recent thread about the
ZenBook S.

I suspect many of these other machines likely do as well, perhaps
under the name "Intel Rapid Storage", RST(e) or simply RAID.

> 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/

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