New Kaby-Lake NUCs: Thunderbolt 3 and Optane NVRAM in -CURRENT?

[Ravi Pokala]

> Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2017 20:10:00 -0800
> From: Murray Stokely <murray at freebsd.org>
> To: hackers at freebsd.org, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org>
> Subject: New Kaby-Lake NUCs: Thunderbolt 3 and Optane NVRAM in
> 	-CURRENT?
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAECWziKb86vLEPAsO7jxu3Vp4HZ1uvrjd7rLPe_FJGA7gpBrqg at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> 
> I've had a good experience with the last generation of Intel NUCs on
> -CURRENT and -STABLE.
> 
> Today Intel announced their latest NUC offerings with Kaby Lake processors,
> Thunderbolt 3, and their Octane NVMe SSDs.
> 
> Any thoughts on how these will perform with -CURRENT?  The hardware isn't
> shipping yet, but will additional driver support be required to e.g. make
> use of the Thunderbolt 3 ports?
> 
> Will these use the Intel Wireless 8260 supported by the iwi driver?
> 
>            - Murray

There shouldn't be any issues w/ the Optane NVMe SSDs, because they are just NVMe SSDs. The NVMe interface standard doesn't make any assumptions about the underlying media of the device, so you can have Optane-backed NVMe just like you have NAND-backed SATA or NAND-backed SAS.

For that matter, you don't need Kaby Lake to use Optane NVMe SSDs, for that same reason. Using Optane *DIMMs*, *does* require some hardware platform support, which may or may not be in Kaby Lake; I don't remember the details on that.

-Ravi (rpokala@)