NVMe INT13h Option ROM

Boot legacy PCs from NVMe storage: YouTube video with ThinkPad T43

This project allows old x86 computers using a classic BIOS to boot from modern NVMe storage attached via PCI(e). It's a heavily modified version of iPXE (which usually allows for booting from the network), but instead of the network, this code uses a port of the SeaBIOS NVMe implementation to talk to a local NVMe drive.

Project status

Works™
Very little fault tolerance and testing on different devices.

Supported hosts

• IBM ThinkPad T43
• QEMU VM, i440fx

Supported SSDs

• Samsung SSD 980
• Corsair Force MP510

Features

• Booting from NVMe storage in Legacy/BIOS mode
• Works on 32bit-only CPUs (Pentium 3, Atom, etc.)
• Option ROM, USB flash drive, SD card, CD-ROM, chainloading (e.g. from grub) booting supported

Limitations

• Write support is currently disabled. The code is present, but it's additional danger for no benefit (for my usecase)
• Only 1 NVMe drive (with 1 namespace) is properly handled at the moment
• 64bit BARs are probably not handled correctly (untested!)

Similar projects / Alternatives

There are 2 other Option ROMs publicly available:

• Samsung 950 Pro (exposed by the PCIe device, device-specific)
• community modded VMWare NVMe ROM (didn't work on my hardware, did work in QEMU)

This project is GPL-licensed, can be freely redistributed (both as binaries and source) and can be instrumented/debugged easily (as it's written in C).