NVMe Firmware: I Need Your Data

In a recent Google Plus post I asked what kind of hardware was most interesting to be focusing on next. UEFI updating is now working well with a large number of vendors, and the LVFS “onboarding” process is well established now. On that topic we’ll hopefully have some more announcements soon. Anyway, back to the topic in hand: The overwhelming result from the poll was that people wanted NVMe hardware supported, so that you can trivially update the firmware of your SSD. Firmware updates for SSDs are important, as most either address data consistency issues or provide nice performance fixes.

Unfortunately there needs to be some plumbing put in place first, so don’t expect anything awesome very fast. The NVMe ecosystem is pretty new, and things like “what version number firmware am I running now” and “is this firmware OEM firmware or retail firmware” are still queried using vendor-specific extensions. I only have two devices to test with (Lenovo P50 and Dell XPS 13) and so I’m asking for some help with data collection. Primarily I’m trying to find out what NMVe hardware people are actually using, so I can approach the most popular vendors first (via the existing OEMs). I’m also going to be looking at the firmware revision string that each vendor sets to find quirks we need — for instance, Toshiba encodes MODEL VENDOR , and everyone else specifies VENDOR MODEL . Some drives contain the vendor data with a GUID, some don’t, I have no idea of the relative number or how many different formats there are. I’d also like to know how many firmware slots the average SSD has, and the percentage of drives that have a protected slot 1 firmware. This all lets us work out how safe it would be to attempt a new firmware update on specific hardware — the very last thing we want to do is brick an expensive new NMVe SSD with all your data on.

So, what do I would like you to do. You don’t need to reboot, unmount any filesystems or anything like that. Just:

1. Install nvme (e.g. dnf install nvme-cli or build it from source
2. Run the following command:

   sudo nvme id-ctrl --raw-binary /dev/nvme0 > /tmp/id-ctrl

3. If that worked, run the following command:

   curl -F type=nvme \
       -F "machine_id="`cat /etc/machine-id` \
       -F file=@/tmp/id-ctrl \
       https://staging.fwupd.org/lvfs/upload_hwinfo

If you’re not sure if you have a NVMe drive you can check with the nvme command above. The command isn’t doing anything with the firmware; it’s just asking the NVMe drive to report what it knows about itself. It should be 100% safe, the kernel already did the same request at system startup.

We are sending your random machine ID to ensure we don’t record duplicate submissions — if that makes you unhappy for some reason just choose some other 32 byte hex string. In the binary file created by nvme there is the encoded model number and serial number of your drive; if this makes you uneasy please don’t send the file.

Many thanks, and needless to say I’ll be posting some stats here when I’ve got enough submissions to be statistically valid.