FreeBSD® Adds NVM Express Drivers

FreeBSD^® recently added NVM Express drivers for PCI Express^® (PCIe^®)-based Solid State Drives (SSDs) to its Enterprise repertoire.  Intel’s Jim Harris was the primary author of the drivers with contributions from EMC’s Joe Golio. The addition of NVM Express drivers positions FreeBSD as a leader of Enterprise solid-state storage technology solutions.  The commit is located at http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=240616. The drivers provide an NVM Express hardware abstraction layer, an NVM Express consumer which exposes namespaces as GEOM disks, and NVM Express management utilities.

NVM Express provides significant storage performance benefits as the enterprise market moves towards PCIe Solid State Drives. FreeBSD’s early adoption and support of NVM Express shows a commitment to making FreeBSD the best platform for building high performance storage systems. This is another instance where integrating hardware vendors, as first class citizens of the FreeBSD community, pays large dividends.  Having these drivers maintained directly in the FreeBSD source tree guarantees the best experience for our users.

Justin Gibbs, President and Founder of the FreeBSD Foundation
David Akerson, Intel Corporation

About FreeBSD — FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for modern server, desktop, and embedded computer platforms. FreeBSD’s code base has undergone over thirty years of continuous development, improvement, and optimization. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. FreeBSD provides advanced networking, impressive security features, and world class performance and is used by some of the world’s busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices.