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Can the NVM Express (NVMe) driver driver-storage-nvme for Illumos be considered usable? It would be nice to use e.g. an Intel DC P3700 PCIe drive for L2ARC as the SAS2 and 3 SSD drives are awfully scarce/expensive at the end of the Channel available to me.

The only reference to an nvme driver for Illumos I could find is https://www.illumos.org/issues/4053

There are a few not too encouraging messages in forums on the topic, for example: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.os.illumos.devel/14870 and http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.os.illumos.devel/14904

But those are from almost a year ago. Any further details on the state of the driver and an estimate whether it would be sane to consider to actually use it for a production system which is not life critical would be most welcome.

jpe
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  • I managed to compile it, but did not manage to get it to work with reasonable effort. (Illumos would benefit of a howto of how to build modules for the running kernel). There appears to be an equivalent Solaris package in Solaris, so there is a working solution out there. In Linux, on the other hand, nvme driver worked out of the box and OpenZFS accepted it happily as a L2ARC device. – jpe Mar 25 '15 at 15:38
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    It has been shipped in smartos. https://smartos.org/bugview/OS-4744 – Fire Oct 01 '15 at 18:39

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Yes, the NVM Express (NVMe) driver driver-storage-nvme for Illumos can definitely be considered usable.

We are using NVMe 1.2 devices (Samsung 960 Pro) on illumos-based OmniOs r151026 with spotless results.

I am not sure about NVMe 1.3 devices though, like Samsung 970 Pro, etc.

gsl
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