I have not been able to install either openSUSE Leap 42.3 or Tumbleweed on my Dell Precision workstation that has a NVMe boot disk. The installer in both cases is not able to see the disk during partition setup. After seeing that Clonezilla is able to mount and see the disk, I noticed a storage controller with the description “RAID bus controller” and it required the vmd.ko kernel module. I suspect that this RAID controller is a PCI bridge that connects to the NVMe drive and is required for the kernel to detect the NVMe drive. I noticed that this kernel module is not present in Leap 42.3 or Tumbleweed installation images/ISOs, hence it never gets loaded (the nvme.ko kernel module is on the disks). I have access to an up and running openSUSE Leap 42.3 system and the vmd.ko kernel module is present on this system. Any reason why it would be omitted on the installation medium/ISOs?
Is there a way to somehow get the installation kernels to load vmd.ko, i.e., load it through grub, add it during installation, or edit the ISO image to include it? This is a work machine, and I’d rather not have to change BIOS settings to get this working, especially since it currently has Windows installed and I don’t want to make the system unbootable since I need it to function for work.
A similar issue was detected and fixed on Ubuntu (see bugreport: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1703339). Would it be worth adding this to the openSUSE installation ISOs?
Thanks,
Valur