Nvme

NVME storage also known as M.2 storage is supported on IRIX as of November 2025. Community member Dominbear/techomancer contributed the code to his GitHub.

Supported Systems

Any system with PCI bridging is supported. This includes the:

O2
Origin 3000
Origin 300
Origin 350/Onyx4/Tezro
Octane (with PCI X-Talk or PCI Card Cage)
Origin 2000/Onyx2

Building

Assumes all installed compiler and utilities:

make           # Compile all modules
make load      # Load driver into kernel
make unload    # Unload driver (doesnt quite work, make reboot does)
make clean     # Remove build artifacts
make nt        # build test program

Caveats

IRIX does not support TRIM (SSD wear leveling). The following precautions are recommended:

Leave 20-30% of the partition free.
Occasionally backup and format, and put the drive into a Linux or BSD box and run fstrim.
Keep backups.

SGI hardware does NOT support booting from NVME. The ARC firmware requires that the kernel be on a block device it can read and access. There's no option ROM support in ARC.