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I'm trying to find more definitive information, but are there documented examples of an OS booting from real NVDIMM (single or multiple), possibly with a DAX filesystem?
I understand that NVDIMM's are pretty small right now (NVDIMM-N currently at max 32 to 64GB), so that makes it somewhat unattractive. One gets tempted into doing some sort of soft RAID scheme, or use a UEFI BIOS capability of interleaving multiple NVDIMM into one device (usually joining only the same NVDIMM's hanging off the same CPU, usually max of 6 devices interleaved into a particular set for a 12 memory slot CPU).
According to this
Windows 10/2016 understands standalone NVDIMM-N (so multiple are recognized as individual drives), but UEFI BIOS interleaved NVDIMM (poor mans RAID 0) is unsupported. In this case does that mean no official Microsoft support but is usable, or truly unrecognized? (The implication is the health management API's would fail since they can't see the individual parts of a interleaved set, but if you didn't need that information...)
It would also appear that one would have to boot from another windows instance to be able to properly build up a GPT partitioned NVDIMM drive with the necessary UEFI partition up front then a NTFS DAX formatted partition for the OS to install to.
Windows seems to be fine about using a NTFS DAX drive for data storage, and a NTFS DAX volume can be accessed as a block device normally so being a system boot volume shouldn't have any adverse effects...
It seems on the linux side, it looks like grub and mdadm and ext4 should have things covered such that you can build up an array from individual PMEM memory devices and deploy a EXT4 DAX filesystem for installation, but it's less clear how well it would understand a UEFI BIOS interleaved NVDIMM set, though it should boot.
So, anyone actually pulled this off yet?
Asteroza
Posted 2017-10-22T23:20:53.553
Reputation: 11