Hi community,

I was wondering why my brand new NVMe SSDs where not listed in lspci neither on XenServer nor XCP-ngit, while some quick tests on CentOS 7 showed they are working properly there.

Some further investigations and after comparing several kernel versions, it turned out that current Intel Xeon platforms (Skylake-E etc.) require a driver for the internal VMD host bridge [1].

A research on kernel.org showed, that VMD is mainline since Linux 4.5. [2]
and CentOS 7.3 backported the driver in 2016 with kernel 3.10.0-514.

Unfortunately XenServer/XCP-ng kernel 4.4.52 is still missing this particular driver.

Do you see any chance to backport support for VMD with current versions of XenServer/XCP-ng as well?

Kind Regards
Kurt

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/solution-briefs/virtual-raid-on-cpu-vroc-solution-brief.pdf
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?h=v4.5&id=3a6384ba105ebbb5e83d040a55bfad2fa43f3048