NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface

specification A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard. There are different types of technical or engineering specificati ...

for accessing a computer's

non-volatile storage Non-volatile memory (NVM) or non-volatile storage is a type of computer memory that can retain stored information even after power is removed. In contrast, volatile memory needs constant power in order to retain data. Non-volatile memory typic ...

media usually attached via

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...

(PCIe) bus. The initialism ''NVM'' stands for ''

non-volatile memory Non-volatile memory (NVM) or non-volatile storage is a type of computer memory that can retain stored information even after power is removed. In contrast, volatile memory needs constant power in order to retain data. Non-volatile memory typic ...

'', which is often NAND

flash memory Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both us ...

that comes in several physical form factors, including

solid-state drive A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is ...

s (SSDs), PCIe add-in cards, and

M.2 M.2, pronounced ''m dot two'' and formerly known as the Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF), is a specification for internally mounted computer expansion cards and associated connectors. M.2 replaces the mSATA standard, which uses the PCI Ex ...

cards, the successor to

mSATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...

cards. NVM Express, as a logical-device interface, has been designed to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices. Architecturally, the logic for NVMe is physically stored within and executed by the NVMe controller chip that is physically co-located with the storage media, usually an SSD. Version changes for NVMe, e.g., 1.3 to 1.4, are incorporated within the storage media, and do not affect PCIe-compatible components such as motherboards and CPUs. By its design, NVM Express allows host hardware and software to fully exploit the levels of parallelism possible in modern SSDs. As a result, NVM Express reduces I/O overhead and brings various performance improvements relative to previous logical-device interfaces, including multiple long command queues, and reduced latency. The previous interface protocols like

AHCI The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is a technical standard defined by Intel that specifies the Hardware register, register-level interface of Serial ATA (SATA) host controllers in a non-implementation-specific manner in its Intel chips ...

were developed for use with far slower

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

s (HDD) where a very lengthy delay (relative to CPU operations) exists between a request and data transfer, where data speeds are much slower than RAM speeds, and where disk rotation and

seek time Higher performance in hard disk drives comes from devices which have better performance characteristics. These performance characteristics can be grouped into two categories: access time and data transfer time (or rate). Access time The ''access ...

give rise to further optimization requirements. NVM Express devices are chiefly available in the form of standard-sized PCI Express

expansion card In computing, an expansion card (also called an expansion board, adapter card, peripheral card or accessory card) is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot (also referred to as a bus slo ...

s and as 2.5-inch form-factor devices that provide a four-lane PCI Express interface through the

U.2 U.2 (pronounced 'u-dot-2'), formerly known as SFF-8639, is a computer interface standard for connecting solid-state drives (SSDs) to a computer. It covers the physical connector, electrical characteristics, and communication protocols. It was ...

connector (formerly known as SFF-8639). Storage devices using

SATA Express SATA Express (sometimes unofficially shortened to SATAe) is a computer bus Interface (computing), interface that supports both Serial ATA (SATA) and PCI Express (PCIe) storage devices, initially standardized in the SATA 3.2 specification. ...

and the M.2 specification which support NVM Express as the logical-device interface are a popular use-case for NVMe and have become the dominant form of solid-state storage for servers, desktops, and laptops alike.

Specifications

Specifications for NVMe released to date include: * 1.0e (January 2013) * 1.1b (July 2014) * 1.2 (November 2014) ** 1.2a (October 2015) ** 1.2b (June 2016) ** 1.2.1 (June 2016) * 1.3 (May 2017) ** 1.3a (October 2017) ** 1.3b (May 2018) ** 1.3c (May 2018) ** 1.3d (March 2019) * 1.4 (June 2019) ** 1.4a (March 2020) **1.4b (September 2020) * 2.0 (May 2021) ** 2.0a (July 2021) ** 2.0b (January 2022) ** 2.0c (October 2022)

Background

Historically, most SSDs used

buses A bus (contracted from omnibus, with variants multibus, motorbus, autobus, etc.) is a road vehicle that carries significantly more passengers than an average car or van. It is most commonly used in public transport, but is also in use for cha ...

such as

SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard to ...

, SAS or

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data cen ...

for interfacing with the rest of a computer system. Since SSDs became available in mass markets, SATA has become the most typical way for connecting SSDs in

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...

s; however, SATA was designed primarily for interfacing with mechanical

s (HDDs), and it became increasingly inadequate for SSDs, which improved in speed over time. For example, within about five years of mass market mainstream adoption (2005–2010) many SSDs were already held back by the comparatively slow data rates available for hard drives—unlike hard disk drives, some SSDs are limited by the maximum

throughput Network throughput (or just throughput, when in context) refers to the rate of message delivery over a communication channel, such as Ethernet or packet radio, in a communication network. The data that these messages contain may be delivered ov ...

of SATA. High-end SSDs had been made using the

bus before NVMe, but using non-standard specification interfaces. By standardizing the interface of SSDs,

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s only need one common

device driver In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and ot ...

to work with all SSDs adhering to the specification. It also means that each SSD manufacturer does not have to design specific interface drivers. This is similar to how

USB mass storage The USB mass storage device class (also known as USB MSC or UMS) is a set of computing communications protocols, specifically a USB Device Class, defined by the USB Implementers Forum that makes a USB device accessible to a host computing device ...

devices are built to follow the

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad v ...

mass-storage device class specification and work with all computers, with no per-device drivers needed. NVM Express devices are also used as the building block of the

burst buffer In the high-performance computing environment, burst buffer is a fast intermediate storage layer positioned between the front-end computing processes and the back-end storage systems. It bridges the performance gap between the processing speed of ...

storage in many leading supercomputers, such as Fugaku Supercomputer, Summit Supercomputer and Sierra Supercomputer, etc.

History

The first details of a new standard for accessing non-volatile memory emerged at the

Intel Developer Forum The Intel Developer Forum (IDF) was a biannual gathering of technologists to discuss Intel products and products based on Intel products. The first IDF was held in 1997. To emphasize the importance of China, the Spring 2007 IDF was held in Beiji ...

2007, when NVMHCI was shown as the host-side protocol of a proposed architectural design that had

Open NAND Flash Interface Working Group The Open NAND Flash Interface Working Group (ONFI or ONFi with a lower case "i") is a consortium of technology companies working to develop open standards for NAND flash memory and devices that communicate with them. The formation of ONFI wa ...

(ONFI) on the memory (flash) chips side. A NVMHCI working group led by Intel was formed that year. The NVMHCI 1.0 specification was completed in April 2008 and released on Intel's web site. Technical work on NVMe began in the second half of 2009.http://www.flashmemorysummit.com/English/Collaterals/Proceedings/2013/20130813_A12_Onufryk.pdf The NVMe specifications were developed by the NVM Express Workgroup, which consists of more than 90 companies; Amber Huffman of

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

was the working group's chair. Version 1.0 of the specification was released on 1 March 2011, while version 1.1 of the specification was released on 11 October 2012. Major features added in version 1.1 are multi-path I/O (with namespace sharing) and arbitrary-length

scatter-gather In computing, vectored I/O, also known as scatter/gather I/O, is a method of input and output by which a single procedure call sequentially reads data from multiple buffers and writes it to a single data stream, or reads data from a data stream a ...

I/O. It is expected that future revisions will significantly enhance namespace management. Because of its feature focus, NVMe 1.1 was initially called "Enterprise NVMHCI". An update for the base NVMe specification, called version 1.0e, was released in January 2013. In June 2011, a Promoter Group led by seven companies was formed. The first commercially available NVMe chipsets were released by

Integrated Device Technology Integrated Device Technology, Inc., is an American corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, that designs, manufactures, and markets low-power, high-performance mixed-signal semiconductor solutions for the advanced communications, com ...

(89HF16P04AG3 and 89HF32P08AG3) in August 2012. The first NVMe drive,

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

's XS1715 enterprise drive, was announced in July 2013; according to Samsung, this drive supported 3 GB/s read speeds, six times faster than their previous enterprise offerings. The LSI

SandForce SandForce was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that designed flash memory controllers for solid-state drives (SSDs). On January 4, 2012, SandForce was acquired by LSI Corporation and became the Flash Compone ...

SF3700 controller family, released in November 2013, also supports NVMe. A Kingston

HyperX HP Inc. is an American multinational information technology company A technology company (or tech company) is an electronics-based technological company, including, for example, business relating to digital electronics, software, and inte ...

prosumer A prosumer is an individual who both consumes and produces. The term is a portmanteau of the words '' producer'' and ''consumer''. Research has identified six types of prosumers: DIY prosumers, self-service prosumers, customizing prosumers, coll ...

" product using this controller was showcased at the

Consumer Electronics Show CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typi ...

2014 and promised similar performance. In June 2014, Intel announced their first NVM Express products, the Intel SSD data center family that interfaces with the host through PCI Express bus, which includes the DC P3700 series, the DC P3600 series, and the DC P3500 series. , NVMe drives are commercially available. In March 2014, the group incorporated to become NVM Express, Inc., which consists of more than 65 companies from across the industry. NVM Express specifications are owned and maintained by NVM Express, Inc., which also promotes industry awareness of NVM Express as an industry-wide standard. NVM Express, Inc. is directed by a thirteen-member board of directors selected from the Promoter Group, which includes Cisco, Dell, EMC, HGST, Intel, Micron, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, PMC, Samsung, SanDisk and Seagate. In September 2016, the CompactFlash Association announced that it would be releasing a new memory card specification,

CFexpress CFexpress is a standard for removable media cards proposed by the CompactFlash Association (CFA). The standard uses PCIe 3.0 interface with 1 to 4 lanes where 1 GB/s data can be provided per lane. NVM Express is also supported to provide low overh ...

, which uses NVMe. NVMe Host Memory Buffer (HMB) added in version 1.2 of the NVMe specification.The Toshiba RC100 SSD Review: Tiny Drive In A Big Market
/ref> HMB allows SSDs to utilize the host's

DRAM Dynamic random-access memory (dynamic RAM or DRAM) is a type of random-access semiconductor memory that stores each bit of data in a memory cell, usually consisting of a tiny capacitor and a transistor, both typically based on metal-oxid ...

, which can improve the I/O performance for DRAM-less SSDs.

Form factors

There are many form factors of NVMe solid-state drive, such as AIC, U.2, U.3, M.2 etc.

AIC (add-in card)

Almost all early NVMe solid-state drives are HHHL (half height, half length) or FHHL (full height, half length) AIC, with a

PCIe PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common mo ...

2.0 or 3.0 interface. A HHHL NVMe solid-state drive card is easy to insert into a PCIe slot of a server.

U.2 (SFF-8639)

, formerly known as SFF-8639, is a computer interface for connecting solid-state drives to a computer. It uses up to four PCI Express lanes. Available servers can combine up to 48 U.2 NVMe solid-state drives.

U.3 (SFF-8639 or SFF-TA-1001)

U.3 is built on the U.2 spec and uses the same SFF-8639 connector. It is a 'tri-mode' standard, combining SAS, SATA and NVMe support into a single controller. U.3 can also support hot-swap between the different drives where firmware support is available. U.3 drives are still backward compatible with U.2, but U.2 drives are not compatible with U.3 hosts.

M.2

, formerly known as the Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF), uses a M.2 NVMe solid-state drive

computer bus In computer architecture, a bus (shortened form of the Latin '' omnibus'', and historically also called data highway or databus) is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers. This ex ...

. Interfaces provided through the M.2 connector are PCI Express 3.0 or

PCI Express 4.0 PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...

(up to four

lanes In road transport, a lane is part of a roadway that is designated to be used by a single line of vehicles to control and guide drivers and reduce traffic conflicts. Most public roads (highways) have at least two lanes, one for traffic in each ...

EDSFF

NVMe-oF

NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) is the concept of using a

transport protocol Transport (in British English), or transportation (in American English), is the intentional movement of humans, animals, and goods from one location to another. Modes of transport include air, land (rail and road), water, cable, pipeline, an ...

over a network to connect remote NVMe devices, contrary to regular NVMe where physical NVMe devices are connected to a PCIe bus either directly or over a PCIe switch to a PCIe bus. In August 2017, a standard for using NVMe over

(FC) was submitted by the standards organization

International Committee for Information Technology Standards The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), (pronounced "insights"), is an ANSI-accredited standards development organization composed of Information technology developers. It was formerly known as the X3 and NCITS. ...

(ICITS), and this combination is often referred to as FC-NVMe or sometimes NVMe/FC. As of May 2021, supported NVMe transport protocols are: * FC, FC-NVMe * TCP, NVMe/TCP *

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

, RoCE v1/v2 ( RDMA over converged Ethernet) *

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

, NVMe over InfiniBand or NVMe/IB The standard for NVMe over Fabrics was published by NVM Express, Inc. in 2016. The following software implements the NVMe-oF protocol: * Linux NVMe-oF initiator and target. RoCE transport was supported initially, and with Linux kernel 5.x, native support for TCP was added. * Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) NVMe-oF initiator and target drivers. Both RoCE and TCP transports are supported. * Starwind NVMe-oF initiator and target for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, supporting both RoCE and TCP transports.

Comparison with AHCI

The

Advanced Host Controller Interface The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is a technical standard defined by Intel that specifies the register-level interface of Serial ATA (SATA) host controllers in a non-implementation-specific manner in its motherboard chipsets. The s ...

(AHCI) has the benefit of wide software compatibility, but has the downside of not delivering optimal performance when used with

SSDs A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is a ...

connected via the

bus. As a logical-device interface, AHCI was developed when the purpose of a

host bus adapter In computer hardware, a host controller, host adapter, or host bus adapter (HBA), connects a computer system bus, which acts as the host system, to other computer network, network and computer storage, storage devices. The terms are primarily ...

(HBA) in a system was to connect the CPU/memory subsystem with a much slower storage subsystem based on rotating

magnetic media Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is acc ...

. As a result, AHCI introduces certain inefficiencies when used with SSD devices, which behave much more like

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * Ra ...

than like spinning media. The NVMe device interface has been designed from the ground up, capitalizing on the lower latency and parallelism of PCI Express SSDs, and complementing the parallelism of contemporary CPUs, platforms and applications. At a high level, the basic advantages of NVMe over AHCI relate to its ability to exploit parallelism in host hardware and software, manifested by the differences in

command queue In computer science, a command queue is a queue for enabling the delay of command execution, either in order of priority, on a first-in first-out basis, or in any order that serves the current purpose. Instead of waiting for each command to be e ...

depths, efficiency of

interrupt In digital computers, an interrupt (sometimes referred to as a trap) is a request for the processor to ''interrupt'' currently executing code (when permitted), so that the event can be processed in a timely manner. If the request is accepted, ...

processing, the number of uncacheable

register Register or registration may refer to: Arts entertainment, and media Music * Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc. * ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller * Registration (organ), the ...

accesses, etc., resulting in various performance improvements. The table below summarizes high-level differences between the NVMe and AHCI logical-device interfaces.

Operating system support

;

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes stylized as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interfac ...

: On February 24, 2015, support for booting from NVM Express devices was added to

. ;

DragonFly BSD DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD in Ju ...

: The first release of

with NVMe support is version 4.6. ;

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

: Intel sponsored a NVM Express driver for

's head and stable/9 branches. The nvd(4) and nvme(4) drivers are included in the GENERIC kernel configuration by default since FreeBSD version 10.2 in 2015. ;

Genode Genode is a free and open-source software operating system (OS) framework consisting of a microkernel abstraction layer and a set of user space components. The framework is notable as one of the few open-source operating systems not derived from ...

: Support for consumer-grade NVMe was added to the Genode framework as part of the 18.05 release. ;

Haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...

gained support for NVMe on April 18, 2019. ;

illumos Illumos (stylized as illumos) is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device ...

received support for NVMe on October 15, 2014. ;

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

: With the release of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus,

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

introduced the first mobile deployment of NVMe over

in smartphones. Apple followed these releases with the release of the first-generation

iPad Pro The iPad Pro is a premium model of Apple's iPad tablet computer. It runs iPadOS, a tablet-optimized version of the iOS operating system. The original iPad Pro was introduced in September 2015, and ran iOS 9. The second-generation iPad Pro ...

and first-generation iPhone SE that also use NVMe over PCIe. ;

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

: Intel published an NVM Express driver for

on 3 March 2011, which was merged into the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

mainline on 18 January 2012 and released as part of version 3.3 of the Linux kernel on 19 March 2012. Linux supports NVMe Host Memory Buffer from version 4.13.1 with default maximum size 128 MB. ;

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

: Apple introduced software support for NVM Express in

Yosemite Yosemite National Park ( ) is an American national park in California, surrounded on the southeast by Sierra National Forest and on the northwest by Stanislaus National Forest. The park is managed by the National Park Service and covers an ar ...

10.10.3. The NVMe hardware interface was introduced in the 2016 MacBook and MacBook Pro. ;

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is a ...

added support for NVMe in NetBSD 8.0. The implementation is derived from OpenBSD 6.0. ;

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project em ...

: Development work required to support NVMe in

has been started in April 2014 by a senior developer formerly responsible for

USB 2.0 Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad v ...

and

support. Support for NVMe has been enabled in the OpenBSD 6.0 release. ;

OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 ...

: Arca Noae provides an NVMe driver for

ArcaOS ArcaOS is an operating system based on OS/2, developed and marketed by Arca Noae, LLC under license from IBM. It was codenamed Blue Lion during its development. It builds on OS/2 Warp 4.52 by adding support for new hardware, fixing defects and l ...

, as of April, 2021. The driver requires advanced interrupts as provided by the ACPI PSD running in advanced interrupt mode (mode 2), thus requiring the SMP kernel, as well. ;

Solaris Solaris may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...

: Solaris received support for NVMe in Oracle Solaris 11.2. ;

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

: Intel has provided an NVMe driver for

, which is included in vSphere 6.0 and later builds, supporting various NVMe devices. As of vSphere 6 update 1, VMware's VSAN software-defined storage subsystem also supports NVMe devices. ;

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

: Microsoft added native support for NVMe to

Windows 8.1 Windows 8.1 is a release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 27, 2013, and broadly released for retail sale on October 17, 2013, about a year after the retail release of its pre ...

and

Windows Server 2012 R2 Windows Server 2012 R2, codenamed "Windows Server 8.1" or "Windows Server Blue", is the seventh version of the Windows Server operating system by Microsoft, as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was unveiled on June 3, 2013 a ...

. Native drivers for

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

and

Windows Server 2008 R2 Windows Server 2008 R2 is the fifth version of the Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft and released as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became General av ...

have been added in updates. Many vendors have released their own Windows drivers for their devices as well. There are also manually customized installer files available to install a specific vendor's driver to any NVMe card, such as using a Samsung NVMe driver with a non-Samsung NVMe device, which may be needed for additional features, performance, and stability. Support for NVMe HMB was added in Windows 10 Anniversary Update (Version 1607) in 2016. : The

OpenFabrics Alliance The OpenFabrics Alliance is a non-profit organization that promotes remote direct memory access (RDMA) switched fabric technologies for server and storage connectivity. These high-speed data-transport technologies are used in high-performance ...

maintains an open-source NVMe Windows Driver for Windows 7/8/8.1 and Windows Server 2008R2/2012/2012R2, developed from the baseline code submitted by several promoter companies in the NVMe workgroup, specifically IDT, Intel, and LSI. The current release is 1.5 from December 2016.

Software support

; QEMU : NVMe is supported by

QEMU QEMU is a free and open-source emulator (Quick EMUlator). It emulates the machine's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest ...

since version 1.6 released on August 15, 2013. NVMe devices presented to QEMU guests can be either real or emulated. ; UEFI : An open source NVMe driver for

UEFI UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is a set of specifications written by the UEFI Forum. They define the architecture of the platform firmware used for booting and its interface for interaction with the operating system. Examples of f ...

is available on SourceForge.

Management tools

nvmecontrol

The nvmecontrol tool is used to control an NVMe disk from the command line on FreeBSD. It was added in FreeBSD 9.2.

nvme-cli

NVM-Express user space tooling for Linux.

References

External links

*
NVMe info

CompactFlash Association

LFCS: Preparing Linux for nonvolatile memory devices

LWN.net LWN.net is a computing webzine with an emphasis on free software and software for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It consists of a weekly issue, separate stories which are published most days, and threaded discussion attached to ever ...

, April 19, 2013, by Jonathan Corbet
Multipathing PCI Express Storage

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Additi ...

, March 12, 2015, by Keith Busch
NVMe, NVMe-oF and RDMA for network engineers
August 2020, by Jerome Tissieres {{Computer bus Computer storage buses Solid-state computer storage Computer hardware standards