R-Comp announce Project N.Ex.T - NVMe
Andrew Rawnsley (492) 1444 posts |
We are pleased to announce RISC OS Project N.Ex.T – NVMe Extreme What is NVMe? First there were hard drives, via IDE then SATA. Then came SSDs, running Put simply, if your current systems use SATA, we hope your next (N.Ex.T?) What is RISC OS Project N.Ex.T? RISC OS Project N.Ex.T is designed to bring super fast NVMe technology to NVMe ports (aka “m.2”) are present on a number of existing systems, from RISC OS Project N.Ex.T is designed to work with all of these, and future Please note that Pinebook Pro / RK3399 support will follow shortly. The Why is this important Outside of the RISC OS world, NVMe has become the standard for SSDs on Both the Pi Compute Module 4 and the RK3399 (Pinebook Pro and other With many users staying with older, well-rounded systems like iMX6 and Ti, What can you buy, and when? RISC OS Project N.Ex.T will be rolling out in phases over the N.Ex.T few Right now, eager early-adopters can purchase a software pack to enable You can also buy software/hardware bundles with (for example) an We can also provide CM4 boards with NVMe slots, or complete machines The NVMe driver is presently in beta state, and we plan to be optimise it Whilst we endeavour to deliver you a robust driver, when dealing with any Products You can buy the software NVMe pack in early access, and receive the driver Alternatively you can order a bundle with an NVMe SSD and CM4-IO board Motherbords or computers with NVMe are available now, with prices We hope your N.Ex.T computer will be powered by RISC OS Project N.Ex.T! Have fun, Andrew |
Jon Abbott (1421) 2641 posts |
As soon as the documentation is available, I’ll look at adding support to Partition Manager. |
Andrew Rawnsley (492) 1444 posts |
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 :) |
Jon Abbott (1421) 2641 posts |
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. |
Cameron Cawley (3514) 156 posts |
This looks interesting. Are there any particular use cases where NVMe excels compared to other storage options? |
Chris Hall (132) 3554 posts |
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. |
Sveinung Wittington Tengelsen (9758) 237 posts |
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. |