On 5/5/25 21:54, Charles Sprickman wrote:
Anyhow, we're trying purchase a few servers (likely this Supermicro:
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/UP/1U/SYS-111E-WR) and since
manufacturers don't seem to validate for FreeBSD these days, I was hoping for
some community input.
Last time I looked into this NVMe (specifically the "U.2" format for servers
that includes hot swap) was supported in FreeBSD but hot swap was kind of iffy. I don't
think too many FreeBSD users/developers at that time had the hardware, most people seemed
to just be using an on-board NVMe drive on desktop or laptop systems, and there's not any
real call for hot swap in that segment.
I have a thread on the forums linked below, but really what I'm looking to find
is some larger orgs that are running NVMe drives and can confirm hot swap works
as expected, if there's any gotchas to be on the lookout for, etc. Trying not
to overcomplicate it, but we don't want to be stuck with a bunch of servers
that might be less stable than our current SAS/SATA servers. We exclusively use
ZFS, if that's useful info.
I can't speak to *physical* hotplug, but I've put a lot of energy over the
past few months into making sure that nvme "hotplug" is 100% functional in
Amazon EC2. If you run into problems it's probably going to be due to
broken firmware, so unless anyone has experience with that specific server
I think the best answer you can get is "it should work but you need to test
it and find out".
--
Colin Percival
FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead & EC2 platform maintainer
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid
