R-Comp announce Project N.Ex.T - NVMe

We are pleased to announce RISC OS Project N.Ex.T – NVMe Extreme
Technology, available in early access this week.

What is NVMe?
=====

First there were hard drives, via IDE then SATA. Then came SSDs, running
on top of the same SATA protocol designed for hard drives. To remove the
constraints of SATA technology, a new technology was designed to allow
SSDs to map directly into memory over the PCI-Express bus – NVMe.
Designed exclusively for SSD/flash technology, the NVMe protocol is
designed for next generation storage. Or N.Ex.T generation storage!

Put simply, if your current systems use SATA, we hope your next (N.Ex.T?)
system will use NVMe.

What is RISC OS Project N.Ex.T?
=======

RISC OS Project N.Ex.T is designed to bring super fast NVMe technology to
RISC OS computers both pre-existing and coming-soon. It can be provided
as a purely software release, or bundled with hardware, from DIY kits to
complete systems.

NVMe ports (aka “m.2”) are present on a number of existing systems, from
RCI’s Hydra systems to TiMachine/Titanium (with PCI-E adapter) to Pinebook
Pro and RK3399 boards. The Pi Foundation’s CM4 baseboard has a PCI-E slot
which can take an NVMe m.2 adapter, and other CM4-based solutions may also
have NVMe, such as those from other suppliers.

RISC OS Project N.Ex.T is designed to work with all of these, and future
systems too.

Please note that Pinebook Pro / RK3399 support will follow shortly. The
project has initially focussed on the pre-existing PCI-E support for
Pi/CM4 because that was a known quantity. The PCI-E support on RK3399 was
evolving in parallel to NVMe development, so can be completed now that the
NVMe driver exists. We’re full steam ahead to sort that out ASAP.

Why is this important
=====

Outside of the RISC OS world, NVMe has become the standard for SSDs on
modern machines. If you buy a laptop with an SSD, it’s probably an NVMe
drive, and all high performance desktop machines will be NVMe based.

Both the Pi Compute Module 4 and the RK3399 (Pinebook Pro and other
machines) platforms expose their PCI-Express busses to RISC OS for NVMe or
other devices. On the Pi in particular, storage is a huge problem because
the standard I/O options (SD card, USB) are very slow on RISC OS. You
have a fast CPU hampered by slow storage. RK3399 platforms fare better
thanks to eMMC, but even that is a far cry from NVMe performance.

With many users staying with older, well-rounded systems like iMX6 and Ti,
the ability to deliver truly N.Ex.T generation platforms with high speed
storage is really important, especially as we approach the pinnacle of
32bit ARM processors.

What can you buy, and when?
=======

RISC OS Project N.Ex.T will be rolling out in phases over the N.Ex.T few
weeks (months?) as it will consist of both software and hardware releases.

Right now, eager early-adopters can purchase a software pack to enable
NVMe support for Pi CM4 solutions such as Hydra or CM4 IO board [with
adapter] or WaveShare boards etc. This will also evolve, at no further
cost, to support RK3399/Pinebook Pro.

You can also buy software/hardware bundles with (for example) an
pre-formated NVME SSD and adapter for CM4-IO board, or with a USB→NVMe
adapter – useful for reading NVMe drives on other machines.

We can also provide CM4 boards with NVMe slots, or complete machines
featuring NVMe. The Hydra – with up to 6 NVMe drives and CPU modules – is
an obvious candidate, but there are cheaper solutions too.

The NVMe driver is presently in beta state, and we plan to be optimise it
further. Right now it can easily exceed the SATA performance of our
existing i.MX6 / Titanium / TiMachine systems, and we’re still near the
beginning of the journey.

Whilst we endeavour to deliver you a robust driver, when dealing with any
storage product, we’d urge customers to keep backups “just in case”.

Products
====

You can buy the software NVMe pack in early access, and receive the driver
right away. The price includes support and updates, and we’re happy to
discuss your hardware options to run it.

Alternatively you can order a bundle with an NVMe SSD and CM4-IO board
PCI-E adatper, or a USB→PCI-E adapter if that is more useful to you.
The SSD will come pre-formatted for RISC OS use to make life easier for
you.

Motherbords or computers with NVMe are available now, with prices
according to specification. Please contact us to discuss your needs,
either via email at rcomp@rcomp.co.uk or by phone on 01925 755043.

We hope your N.Ex.T computer will be powered by RISC OS Project N.Ex.T!

Have fun,

Andrew

As soon as the documentation is available, I’ll look at adding support to Partition Manager.

At the encouragement of the wise-owls at ROOL, it looks like we may end up sharing some module/swi allocations across both NVMe solutions (subject to final confirmation from my counterpart at RISCOSbits) so API should end up very similar/identical.

Ironically I’d intended to surprise-announce our driver embracing open source (like we did for the iMX6 hardware acceleration driver) at the SW Show (wanted to keep some surprises). Well played to my competitor on the pre-empt :)

You already know my view on the situation, so I’m pleased to see cooperation toward one standard.

I did drop Andy a list of SWI’s I’d need documentation on for Partition Manager last month, there might be some things that are easily overlooked during implementation, such being able to safely disconnect/reconnect drives so RISC OS detects drive/partition changes, scanning/identifying drive details, low-level access bypassing partitioning etc.

You’ve probably both got all this covered so I’ll wait until there’s some documentation to review.

This looks interesting. Are there any particular use cases where NVMe excels compared to other storage options?

See here for a discussion on SATA versus NVMe. Limited by the PCIe Gen 3×1 interface to sequential read/write of 400MB/s (like SATA) but there should be faster random read/write than SATA so copying files should be faster.

This is good news, even when coming in the approaching Sunset of 32-bit land. Unless there are big markets out there relying on CPUs with 32-bit support, embedded and the like, the shrinking RISC OS marketplace – a shadow of its former self – cannot justify continued production in the near future. And paying more per CPU than prototyping for a shrinking RISC OS market isn’t interesting for any Fab.

Even an operating system has to make business sense. There is an area between Noble Legacy and Totally Obsolete where RISC OS currently finds itself, being practically unknown to the computing world (never mind in general) – no one has ever even heard about it.

So it’s join the 64-bit world or become (unknown) history in a few years time. Being able to read any storage device everybody else can read isn’t a saving factor here, not in this case. Just the security issue is more than enough. Can be fixed in a 64-bit transition.