Is it possible for rEFInd to detect a grub EFI install or a Linux /boot partition on an NVMe motherboard that doesn't suppot NVMe boot?

[tuxayo]

By a grub EFI install I mean be able to detect and boot the content of an ESP partition of a typical Linux install. (Debian, Mint, openSUSE Tumbleweed)
By a Linux /boot partition I mean be able to detect the content of the /boot partition with the kernel.

I have rEFInd on a SATA SSD and I did a regular install of various Linux distros on an NVMe SSD, so the NVMe install contains an ESP populated with grub, and a /boot partition populated with the rest of grub and the kernel. I was hoping for rEFInd to be able to bypass the fact that the motherboard can't boot the ESP from the NVMe SSD directly. Until now, I can't have either grub from ESP or the kernels to be detected by rEFInd.

Does that mean that rEFIned needs help from the motherboard to boot a grub install from the ESP or a Linux kernel?

[tuxayo]

Can't fix typo in the title, nooooooo!

[Roderick W. Smith]

rEFInd relies on the firmware to read the filesystem(s) on the boot medium, so if the motherboard doesn't support the disk hardware, rEFInd can't help. At least, mostly....

In theory, if you had an EFI driver for the hardware in question, you could load it like an EFI filesystem driver (as described in the rEFInd documentation. IIRC, there's an NVMe driver in the Clover boot loader, so you might try there. I make no promises that this would work, though. Also, of course, the EFI must be able to load rEFInd itself.

There is another option, though: Put the ESP and the Linux distributions' /boot partitions on media that the EFI can read. Neither the ESP nor the /boot partition is read very often once the computer is booted, so they don't need to be on the speediest media. Even a USB flash drive can do in a pinch.