Windows

The Windows backend communicates with the Windows NVMe driver StorNVMe.sys via IOCTLs. The backend relies on the NVMe pass-through through IOCTLs to submit admin, IO and arbitrary user-defined commands.

System Configuration

To use the Windows backend you need to be running Windows. xNVMe is likely to work on multiple different versions of Windows, however Windows 10, or later, is recommended as it has all the features which xNVMe utilizes. Alternatively, to ensure compatibility, you can use the version listed in the Toolchain section.

Device Identifiers

Windows exposes NVMe devices as files using the following naming schemes:

\\.\PhysicalDrive{ctrlr_id}

NVMe Controller device node

Instrumentation

The backend identifier for the Windows backend is: windows. The Windows backend encapsulates the interfaces below. Some of these are mix-ins from the Common-Backend Implementations. For these, links point to descriptions in the CBI section. For the Windows-specific interfaces, descriptions are available in the corresponding subsections.

• Memory Allocators

  • windows`, Use Windows memory allocator

• Asynchronous Interfaces

  • iocp, Use Windows readfile/writefile with overlapped(iocp) for Asynchronous I/O

  • iocp_th, Use Windows readfile/writefile with thread based overlapped(iocp) for Asynchronous I/O

  • io_ring, Use Windows io_ring for Asynchronous I/O

  • emu, add link to CBI

  • thrpool, add link to CBI

• Synchronous Interfaces

  • nvme, Use Windows NVMe Driver ioctl() for synchronous I/O

  • file, Use Windows File System APIs and readfile()/writefile() for I/O

• Admin Interfaces

  • nvme, Use Windows NVMe Driver ioctl() for admin commands

  • block, Use Windows NVMe Driver ioctl() for admin commands

  • file, Use Windows File System APIs for admin commands

• Device Interfaces

  • windows, Use Windows file/dev handles and enumerate NVMe devices