Unable to access NVMe SSD on VIM3

[ljbeal]

Describe the issue you are experiencing

Hi!

I've been running home assistant for a while now installed on a VIM3 Pro. It's been running smoothly for almost a year now.

I am, however noticing that the dashboard is taking longer and longer to load data into the graphs. I read that the most probable cause of that is slow storage. This makes sense, since HAOS is installed onto the eMMC, which from my understanding is not much better than an SD card. I've also experienced a few occasions where I will wake up to things not loading properly (or at all, requiring a restart). I get the feeling that the eMMC might be acting up.

To alleviate this, I bought an m.2 NVMe SSD, and tried (and failed) to move the install over to it. (oowow isn't able to flash to NVMe, but that's not particularly relevant here).

My backup plan was to reinstall to eMMC, and then use the SSD as the data dir. However I'm not able to access the drive.

I know that the drive functions, since during my attempts to install HAOS on the SSD, I tested an Ubuntu (eMMC) install, and formatted the drive there. So the hardware seems to function as expected.

The drive is not present in terminal with a ha os datadisk list, returning nothing:

devices: []
disks: []

It's also not present in hardware -> All Hardware. In Ubuntu lsblk would show it under something similar to nvme1 (don't recall the exact path but the key point is that it's not there in HA).

Not exactly sure what can be done about this (perhaps this is one to put on the khadas forums?) but any advice is welcome.

What operating system image do you use?

khadas-vim3 (Khadas VIM3)

What version of Home Assistant Operating System is installed?

11.4

Did you upgrade the Operating System.

Yes

Steps to reproduce the issue

VIM3 Pro

no presence of nvme* in All Hardware, nor is anything shown in ha os datadisk list

Anything in the Supervisor logs that might be useful for us?

Only messages regarding my own automations

Anything in the Host logs that might be useful for us?

Nothing relevant. Here's the sum total of the logs while verifying info for this issue:

Jan 21 13:26:25 homeassistant kernel: audit: type=1334 audit(1705843585.756:363): prog-id=120 op=LOAD
Jan 21 13:26:25 homeassistant systemd-timesyncd[523]: Network configuration changed, trying to establish connection.
Jan 21 13:26:25 homeassistant systemd[1]: Started Journal Gateway Service.
Jan 21 13:26:25 homeassistant systemd-timesyncd[523]: Contacted time server 162.159.200.123:123 (time.cloudflare.com).
Jan 21 13:26:25 homeassistant systemd-journal-gatewayd[54245]: microhttpd: MHD_OPTION_EXTERNAL_LOGGER is not the first option specified for the daemon. Some messages may be printed by the standard MHD logger.

Nothing relevant in the logs for the Terminal application, either.

System information

System Information

version	core-2024.1.5
installation_type	Home Assistant OS
dev	false
hassio	true
docker	true
user	root
virtualenv	false
python_version	3.11.6
os_name	Linux
os_version	6.1.71-haos
arch	aarch64
timezone	Europe/Paris
config_dir	/config

Home Assistant Community Store

GitHub API	ok
GitHub Content	ok
GitHub Web	ok
GitHub API Calls Remaining	5000
Installed Version	1.33.0
Stage	running
Available Repositories	1383
Downloaded Repositories	4
HACS Data	ok

Home Assistant Cloud

logged_in	false
can_reach_cert_server	ok
can_reach_cloud_auth	ok
can_reach_cloud	ok

Home Assistant Supervisor

host_os	Home Assistant OS 11.4
update_channel	stable
supervisor_version	supervisor-2023.12.1
agent_version	1.6.0
docker_version	24.0.7
disk_total	27.9 GB
disk_used	7.7 GB
healthy	true
supported	true
board	khadas-vim3
supervisor_api	ok
version_api	ok
installed_addons	Mosquitto broker (6.4.0), Studio Code Server (5.15.0), Terminal & SSH (9.8.1)

Dashboards

dashboards	1
resources	1
views	6
mode	storage

Recorder

oldest_recorder_run	12 January 2024 at 10:47
current_recorder_run	21 January 2024 at 09:00
estimated_db_size	1445.04 MiB
database_engine	sqlite
database_version	3.41.2

Additional information

No response

[agners]

It seems that the PCIe port is disabled by default. We do use upstream U-Boot, which does not include the kbi tool required by this guide: https://docs.khadas.com/products/sbc/vim3/configurations/usb-pcie-switch

However, the command does a simple I2C write, which can be done from the U-Boot prompt with the following commands:

HAOS> i2c dev 0
Setting bus to 0
HAOS> i2c mw 0x18 0x33 1

Unfortunately it seems that we still miss a driver to make PCIe (and NVMe) support fully work. I've enabled it with PR #3100. So it should be possible to use the NVMe with the next release.

[ljbeal]

This is excellent news, thank you for the update. I'll be sure to test it out as soon as it's available

[sairon]

The driver should be available since 11.5.rc1, so I'm closing this. Let us know if you encounter any issues.

[ljbeal]

Can confirm that everything is working on my device now. Updated and moved the data disk with no issues