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NVMe is largely the model people here are complaining about. A small kernel shim driver that is talking to a huge firmware code base on the other side of a mailbox interface. Even on small m.2 style standalone drives, your looking at code, which not only handles the details of managing flash error correction, wear leveling, garbage collection, etc, etc, but all the code required to manage the thermal, voltage, pcie link training, etc of the 2-5 or so microcontrollers embedded in the drive and possibly an RTOS or two hosting it all. Never mind fabric attach (DPU?) NVMe devices which do all that, plus deal with thin provisioning, partitioning, deduplication, device sharing, replication, RAID, etc, etc. Frequently themselves embedding a Linux (or similar level of complexity OS) kernel in the control plane. |