[smartmontools-support] nvme drive partial support

[Christian Franke]

Kwon-Young Choi wrote:
>> I don't know. If there is no new firmware available which fixes this,
>> you could possibly report the problem to SK hynix customer support.
> I found that there is a dell firmware update for my ssd but I need
> windows to do the update :(

Various Windows programs which are useful for "rescue" purposes could be 
run from the limited Windows PE environment. For example: 7-Zip GUI, 
Cygwin (bash, dd, ddrescue, fdisk, hexedit, ...), VeraCrypt, and ... 
smartctl.
This may also work with the dell firmware update tool. Would require 
32-bit Win10 install media, as the 64-bit WinPE has no 32-bit subsystem.


I wrote 2020-11-13:
> ...
>
> There is actually a bug in smartctl.
>
> The difference in the commands above is the size read from the log. In 
> the early days of smartctl NVMe support (2016), I decided to always 
> read the full log regardless of the desired print size - and 
> unfortunately introduced a bug: smartctl reads too many (64) bytes 
> from the log. Most drives behave polite and return extra 64 null bytes.

After reading NVMe spec more carefully (as I apparently did 4+ years 
ago), I take that back. Smartctl interprets the number of Error Log Page 
Entries (ELPE) correctly. It is defined as a "0's based value": number N 
represents value N+1. The command "nvme error-log ..." does the same.

What's left is the drive firmware bug. I possibly will add the 
workaround already described.

Thanks,
Christian