[coreboot] (libre) Add-on cards for getting higher SSD throughput on the KGPE-D16?

[Daniel Kulesz]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2018 17:40:56 -0500
"Taiidan at gmx.com" <Taiidan at gmx.com> wrote:

> I concur with what tim said and I too recommend getting the much faster 
> TALOS 2 - the current board/cpu combo price is quite reasonable (only $2.5K)
> 

Yes, but KGPE-D16's PCIe v2 x4 should be enough for 2 GB/s which is more than current entry-level M.2 NVMe SSDs need. Since I have the KGPE-D16 already (and DDR4 reg ecc prices are very high), I'd like to max it out before upgrading.

> You might also be interested in this.
> http://www.openssd-project.org/wiki/The_OpenSSD_Project

Yes, I've heard of that but it does not seem to be anywhere near a production-ready state with available hardware, yet. For the meantime, I am okay with using closed-source drive firmware as it's sandboxed and its capabilities are controlled by open software/firmware. As far as I understood this is true for SATA drives, but I am not sure if the same accounts for NVMe drives as well. What kind of firmware does actually run on the NVMe controller and to which data/registers does it have access? Is there a substantial difference to SATA via AHCI?

Cheers, Daniel