Add NVMe support to the smartmontools

[Alex Samorukov]

About

It would be great to add NVMe support to the smartctl. This task is not very trivial - because smart in NVMe is implemented differently then in SCSI/SAS or SATA. This ticket will be used to track changes in smartmontools and to collect important related links.

NVMe standard

• Official specifications: ​http://nvmexpress.org/specifications/
• ​Intel NVMe documentation with some Intel-specific pages.

Hardware and emulation

• ​QEMU fork which can emulates NVMe device with most of the features supported, including SMART log pages, namespaces, etc. Tested with Linux and FreeBSD, full list of the options could be found in the ​source code.

Linux NVMe support

• NVMe kernel header ​linux/nvme.h
• ​nvme-cli - NVM-Express user space tooling for Linux
• ​nvme-user - another opensource userspace utility

FreeBSD NVMe support

• NVMe kernel header ​dev/nvme/nvme.h
• ​nvmecontrol utility, ​opensource.

Windows NVMe support

• ​OpenFabrics NVMe driver for Windows. It provides a NVME_PASS_THROUGH I/O-control which is reportedly also supported by the NVMe Windows drivers from Intel and OCZ.
• ​IOCTL_STORAGE_PROTOCOL_COMMAND - NVMe pass-through I/O-control supported by the generic NVMe driver for Windows (Stornvme.sys). Requires Windows 10.
• ​Naraeon SSD tools windows opensource NVMe tool set
• Intel® ​Solid-State Drive Data Center Tool

OS X NVMe support

• Kind of official support added from 10.10.3, closes source, not documented, only apple-branded NVMe devices are supported. Implements NVMeSMARTClient library, however API is not documented.
• ​MacVidCards NVMe driver - third party closed-source driver, coming with closed-source nvme-cli management utility, which is based on open-source one.

Solaris NVMe support

• ​nvmeadm - NVM Express controller command line interface

[Alex Samorukov]

​https://github.com/linux-nvme/nvme-cli - open source tool to get NVME information on Linux (including SMART data).
​https://github.com/xnox/nvme-user - another NVMe Linux utility
​http://nvmexpress.org/specifications/ - specifications, including SCSI translation interface
​http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-specifications/ssd-dc-p3608-spec.pdf - Intel specification with some Intel-only pages documented

[Christian Franke]

Adding NVMe support makes sense.

Logical structure of NVMe commands and returned SMART related information is different both to ATA and SCSI. A new (-d nvme) pass_through interface and related printing routines are required. Unlike SAT, the NVMe SCSI translation interface is not very useful as it does not (yet?) provide a NVMe pass-through command.

[Christian Franke]

​https://svn.openfabrics.org/svnrepo/nvmewin/ - OpenFabrics NVMe driver for Windows.
It provides a NVME_PASS_THROUGH I/O-control which is reportedly also supported by the NVMe Windows drivers from Intel and OCZ.

[Alex Samorukov]

In the FreeBSD NVMe SMART data could be obtained using ​nvmecontrol utility.

[Alex Samorukov]

Windows opensource NVMe tool set: ​http://naraeon.net/en/latest-naraeon-ssd-tools/

[Alex Samorukov]

QEMU with nvme support: ​https://github.com/OpenChannelSSD/qemu-nvme/. It could be used for the development purpose.

[Christian Franke]

​IOCTL_STORAGE_PROTOCOL_COMMAND - NVMe pass-through I/O-control supported by the generic NVMe driver for Windows (Stornvme.sys). Requires Windows 10.

[Alex Samorukov]

Recent (10.10.3+) OSX/Darwin also supports NVME and there is undocumented NVMeSMARTClient library. No userland client [yet] found. Also only apple-branded devices are supported by official driver.

Non-apple NVMe devices are supported by 3rd party driver, see ​http://www.macvidcards.com/nvme-faq.html. This driver has some management tool, but no API description found.