I’ve recently begun supporting Linux installed on devices with built-in nvme ssds. I noticed the device files had an extra number, beyond a number identifying the drive number and the partition number. IDE/SATA/SCSI drives normally only have a drive letter and partition number.
For example: /dev/nvme0n1p2
I got to wondering what the n1 part was, and after a bit of searching, it looks like that identifies an nvme ‘namespace’. The definitions for it were kind of vague: “An NVMe namespace is a quantity of non-volatile memory (NVM) that can be formatted into logical blocks.”
So, does this act like a partition that is defined at the hardware controller level, and not in an MBR or GPT partition table? Can a namespace span multiple physical nvme ssd’s? E.g. can you create a namespace that pools together storage from multiple ssd’s into a single logical namespace, similar to RAID 0?
What would you do with an NVME namespace that you can’t already achieve using partition tables or LVM or a filesystem that can manage multiple volumes (like ZFS, Btrfs, etc)?
Also, why does it seem like the namespace numbering starts at 1 instead of 0? Is that just something to do with how NVME tracks the namespace numbers at a low level (e.g. partitions also start at 1, not 0, because that is how the standard for partition numbers was set, so the Linux kernel just uses whatever the partition number that is stored on disk is – I guess nvme works the same way?)