Can ZBM on EFI SATA boot system on NVMe without NVMe support in BIOS?

[pavhofman]

Hi, let's assume an older PC with BIOS without NVMe support. I place ZBM binary on EFI partition on a SATA drive so that the EFI BIOS can load it. Please can ZBM boot ZFS root installed on NVMe drives? Thanks!

[no-usernames-left]

Yes, I do this today on a box with no NVMe driver in firmware. It works great as long as EFI can find ZBM, be it on SATA, USB flash, SD, whatever.

[pavhofman]

Thanks a lot! Yesterday I learnt the hard way that grub2-efi on SATA EFI cannot access NVMe drives with linux/windows, it does not see the drives at all. Please can ZBM also boot non-ZFS linux root? If so, IIUC it could replace grub-efi even for non-zfs linux installations on older yet still good machines without NVMe-capable bios. Thanks!

[no-usernames-left]

Please can ZBM also boot non-ZFS linux root?

I have no idea. For me, it's ZFS || GTFO.

[classabbyamp]

can ZBM also boot non-ZFS linux root?

no, it's called ZFSBootMenu for a reason

[classabbyamp]

the interface the drives use does not matter, as long as it's supported by linux