NVMe knowledge base

[Brabbelbla]

EDIT: with the new patches for IONVMeFamily, everything seems to work fine.

 

 

Hi all,

I think it's high time there was a central point for reference on using an NVMe drive under OS X, for new users and also for motherboard buyers. As there is no other place yet, let's start here! Perhaps a wiki page would be a better idea, certainly with respect to the motherboard list that will hopefully appear here. Please correct me if I am wrong anywhere!

Basics
In principle, it is possible:
1) If your motherboard does not support NVMe booting, you have to start Clover from some other place, and place NVMExpressDxe in drivers64-UEFI so Clover can launch the OS from an NVMe drive.;
2) Fetch the driver from http://www.macvidcards.com/nvme-driver1.html. Extract and place NVMeGeneric.kext in your Clover directory under Kexts/10.11 to have Clover inject it.
Note: Installing the driver under System/Library/Extensions or Library/Extensions does NOT work if you want to use any NVMe drive as boot drive. Having it there prevents that, even if you also have it injected by Clover. For data drive usage only it is fine there.
3) For boot drive usage: launch the OS X installer with the injected driver and install OS X to the NVMe drive that should be visible in Disk Utility or anywhere else.

Issues
For some users this works fine. So far the good news. For others, myself included, it doesn't work fine and there are issues, there being two:
1) Sleep results in delays at wake. After waking there are a couple of lines in the systems logs about aborted requests, and it takes about 15-20 seconds for the system to become responsive again. Harmless?
Hypothesis: is an issue only with 100 series boards? Have seen no report from older series having it.
2) Kernel panics at boot/logoff/shutdown/reboot. Potentially more serious and certainly more annoying. From my personal experience: rarely at boot, sometimes at logoff, often at shutdown and most of the time at reboot.
Varies with motherboard model. Also with OS X version?

Unfortunately, the driver developer, @jimj740 at MacRumors has not responded to these issues for months.

Motherboards
Brings me to the last section: which boards do work with the NVMe driver and which don't work (well). If your board isn't in the list already or your experience is different, please post. Please include OS X version, motherboard model, motherboard revision (if known, usually printed on the board itself), BIOS version and any issues you encounter.


NO ISSUES

Gigabyte X58A-UD7 rev. 1 with Lycom DT120 PCIe x4 adapter, Samsung SM951 NVMe, OS X 10.11.3 *
Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H rev. 1.2 with Startech M.2 to PCI-E 4 adapter, Samsung 950 Pro, OS X 10.11.4

 

WAKE DELAY ONLY

Gigabyte Z170X-UD5, Samsung 950 Pro, OS X 10.11 *

 

REBOOT ISSUES

ASRock Z170 Extreme7+, Samsung 950 Pro, OS X 10.11.5 *

ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming rev. 1.04, BIOS 1805, Samsung 950 Pro, OS X 10.11.5

 

* from earlier poll.

Edited September 22, 2016 by Brabbelbla

[AppleIIGuy]

Gigabyte Z97x UD5H rev 1.2

Using Startech M.2 to PCI-E 4 adapter booting Samsung 950 pro 512mb M.2 NVME.

Currently booting 10.11.4

No issues with sleep / reboot / shutdown.

[Brabbelbla]

Updated.

[Multisaft]

I would give a detail feedback about my experience as soon as I get my system up and running with all the details and with the help of the forum. therefore I would like to request some help here:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/312652-dsdtssdt-help-i7-5820k-asrock-x99m-extreme4/

[Badeendje]

Have been a pioneer of sorts for NVME, been mainly active on IRC.

Either way I've got a known issue that you haven't collected so far yet.

 

Setup;

Asrock Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac

Samsung 950 Pro

OSX 10.11.2 and 10.11.3

genericnvme.kext

 

So NVME possibly caused me restart issues as well while using sleep, but haven't been able to pinpoint to an exact cause so far as nothing was to be found in the logs.

However it gets fun (not!) with 10.11.4! it means auto data corruption! The SSD isn't readable anymore by osx and won't boot.

The only solution is to go to the installer, and either install it again after a format or use time machine (after a format as well).

Data corruption is a known issue although it isn't exactly wide spread by the looks of it.

Haven't tested 10.11.5 but I'm quite sure it has the same issues and at this point I decided to keep windows on it till pike has come up with a solution (he found data corruption issues as well!).

[Brabbelbla]

Sorry for not getting back to this, but I also ditched Mac for quite a while, but was happy to see that with the patches for IONVMeFamily these problems seem to be solved.