Installing on Dell T5820

[indgy]

I'm trying to install FreeBSD 13.1 on a Dell T5820 Xeon W-2155, it has 2x NVMe SSD in caddies with an Intel Virtual RAID on CPU (VRoC) setup or VMD.

I've disabled the VRoC in BIOS expecting it to pass the NVME drives through to the PCI bus but the installer cannot see the drives.

nvd0 and nvme0 shows up in dmesg on boot, but when I drop to a shell it's not visible in /dev

in the bootloader lsdev does not show the nvme drives.

Here an excerpt from my dmesg

pcib10: Power Fault Detected
nvme0: «Generic NVMe Device» at device 0.0 numa-domain 0 on pci10
nvd0: «SKHynix_HF5256GD9TNI-L2B0B> NVMe namespace
nvd0: 244198MB (500118192 512 byte sectors)
nvd0: detached

And from the shell..

nvmecontrol devlist
No NVMe Controllers Found

I thought it might be a case of unsupported hardware, but one drive does show up, weirdly the other does not. However the drive that shows in dmesg is not listed in /dev and nvmecontrol cannot see it either.

Both drives show in BIOS and I have the option of enabling VMD.

This machine booted windows from the nvme drives ok.

I’m not sure if the power error is important?

I'd appreciate any pointers..

I will try a plug in pcie card tomorrow..

 

[indgy]

The pcie nvme card worked fine plugged into a pcie slot on the main board. I installed the os then removed the nvme drive from the pice slot and added it back to the raid caddy, it reached the loader but the failed to boot as it could not see the drive. I’m guessing this hardware is not supported.

There’s a couple of options in the BIOS I can check to disable VRoC and VMD.

I’ll try that next..

 

[indgy]

I have upgraded the machine to the latest BIOS (23rd Mar 2023) I can downgrade it if necessary.

With VRoC and VMD disabled, the BIOS suggests it should revert to plain NVME pass through but for whatever reason FreeBSD can boot but not see the drive to mount it and continue booting.

Instead it's dumps out at the mountroot> prompt, according to geom the only available drives are da0 and cd0 - nvme0 has disappeared..

This older post discusses someone else having issues installing through VRoC/RST..

r/freebsd - Can i access a NVMe Intel RST SSD from FreeBSD?

8 votes and 8 comments so far on Reddit

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