Are you booting a Dell R730 (or similar) from NVMe? Details please!
My next goal: boot from PCIe slots on a Dell R730. I'm already doing that on a Dell R720, nothing special was required. [1]
I have looked at NVMe booting in the past, but abandoned that idea in favor of PCIe. [2]
This time, I created a bootable image using mfsBSD's zfsinstall [3] but I've been unable to tell the R730 to boot from it.
I have unable to get the NVMe drive to show up in the Boot option for the R730. I have tried both UEFI and BIOS boot modes (see System BIOS Settings | Boot Settings).
Someone had mentioned Dell makes a "4x NVMe carrier that uses a single 16x slot with bifurcation." [4] I think that's Dell part number: 80G5N - those are selling on eBay for $100+ -Before I purchase, I'd like to get verification from someone that they work.
[2] - https://gist.github.com/dlangille/92db3ee52a710c735423ece715addeff
[3] - https://gist.github.com/dlangille/961b154183c64fef4b39b50870c3b1f2
[4] - https://twitter.com/DarkainMX/status/1619133614599602177
@dvl Isn't NVMe just SSD connected to PCIe? (via the controller chip?) That is to say NVMe *is* PCIe.
@david one would like to think so.
@dvl I found this. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/tcp2rz/dell_poweredge_r730_boot_from_pcie_m2_device/
It is a disaster of a set of instructions, and I doubt you need all of it. Some of the takeaways that seem to be important in my researching is that you may need to use GPT and UEFI booting if you haven't tried it yet, and you may be able to get UEFI/option rom 'platform firmware' for the SSD itself, thus it won't need BIOS support to boot it will have its own firmware.
@david Thank you, yes, I also found that. The interesting bit, it seems to be double booting. You need a USB drive to boot clover[1], which then boots your NVMe.
One of the comments says "just one more thing that could cause issues down the line" - if I can avoid it, I will. Which pushes me towards SSD mounted on a PCIe card, which also gives me hot-swap.
Not 100% sure yet. Still reading.
[1] - https://github.com/CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader/releases
@dvl double booting from USB stick 🤮 I hadn't followed closely enough that, I though that was just to do an update step, not a forever thing
@david I also found this other mention of Clover with Windows.
https://www.tachytelic.net/2020/10/dell-poweredge-install-boot-pci-nvme/
@dvl If you need assistance with FreeBSD UEFI/GPT boot I can help, I am an expert here, I wrote my own FreeBSD UEFI secure-boot setup :)