NVME drives on RISC OS?

Now that there are a couple of boards that can run RISC OS with PCI-E 1x ports the possibility of an NVME driver could be getting closer.
NVME to PCI-E 1x adapters are available on Amazon for less than 10GBP.

Here’s the result of plugging an NVME drive into one of the Titanium PCI-E 1x slots.

*pcidevices
No. Bus Dev Fun  Description
  1   0   1   0  Non volatile memory controller
*pciinfo 1
Description         : Non volatile memory controller
Location            : Bus 0, Device 1, Function 0
Class code          : 010802
Vendor ID           : 144D
Device ID           : A808
Revision ID         : 00
Subsystem vendor ID : 144D
Subsystem ID        : A801
Addresses           : Memory 10004000-10007FFF
Interrupt pin       : INTA#
Interrupt line      : 145
Command register    : Memory response enabled
                      Bus mastering enabled
Status register     : Capabilities list implemented
                      Fast DEVSEL# timing
Capabilities        : Power management
                      Message signalled interrupts
                      PCI Express
                      MSI-X
*

It’s been mentioned that the RPi CM4 firmware could be updated to support booting directly off an NVME drive. Maybe this will help with getting an NVME driver for RISC OS.

I got hold of an Iyonix to play with NVMe. Unfortunately putting one in a PCI to PCIe adapter caused a hard boot failure – machine wouldn’t even power up. So that was the end of that.

Is that the right way around? I’ve seen adapters for using PCI cards in PCIe machines, but I haven’t heard of using PCIe cards in PCI machines. Is the adapter supposed to do that?

Yes, this is the adapter I tried :

(I suspect the issue was the Iyonix not handling PCI 2.3 that this card supports. I didn’t have any means to analyse the PCI connection to investigate, although I have access to a PCIe analyser)

Interesting! “Today I learned…”