NVMe BIOS Option ROM

Native NVMe boot capability for almost any x86 PC
By Manawyrm and tSYS |

ThinkPad T43 with ExpressCard-connected external NVMe SSD Laptop showing KittenLabs NVMe Boot

What is it?

The NVMe BIOS Option ROM is a heavily modified version of iPXE, which can be integrated into a computers BIOS (or provided via a PCI card, USB flash drive, SD card, etc.).
It allows x86 computers to boot from NVMe devices attached via PCIe, even on devices which are much older than NVMe itself.

The NVMe implementation was ported from SeaBIOS and modified to work with iPXE.

The resulting Option ROM is only 23040 bytes (22.5 KiB!) large, so it will fit comfortably into any BIOS, flash chip or storage medium.

ThinkPad T43 booting Windows XP

ExpressCard/34 and /54

Commercially available adapters can adapt NVMe M.2 2242 SSDs into an ExpressCard/34 form factor:

NVMe to ExpressCard/34 adapter NVMe to ExpressCard/34 adapter

These can be used in older devices like a ThinkPad T43, T410, T430.