wiki:NVMe_Support

Version 8 (modified by Christian Franke, 8 years ago) ( diff )

Got positive test result for OCZ NVMe driver for Windows

Smartmontools NVMe support

About NVMe

VM Express, NVMe, or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCI), is a logical device interface specification for accessing non-volatile storage media attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. Some links related to the standard and vendor-specific implementations provided below:

Smartmontools NVMe support

Smartmontools supports NVMe starting from version 6.5. Please note, that currently NVMe support is considered as experimental. Currently implemented features:

  • Basic information about controller name, firmware, capacity (smartctl -i)
  • SMART overall-health self-assessment test result and warnings (smartctl -H)
  • NVMe SMART attributes (smartctl -A)
  • NVMe error log (smartctl -l error[,NUM])
  • Ability to fetch any nvme log (smartctl -l nvmelog,N,SIZE)
  • The smartd daemon tracks health (-H), error count (-l error) and temperature (-W DIFF,INFO,CRIT)

Currently NVMe support is implemented on Linux, Windows and FreeBSD. Details about supported version/driver combinations are provided in the next section.

NVMe support in the different OS

OS and driverSupported by OSSupported by SmartmontoolsNative management toolsNotes
Linux, since kernel version 3.3nvme-cli, nvme-user
FreeBSD 9.2 or laternvmecontrol
NetBSD - - Plans to add NVMe support are in the NetBSD Storage Roadmap
OpenBSD - - See this thread
OSX 10.10.3 native NVMe support - Only Apple-branded NVMe devices are supported, monitoring API is implemented (NVMeSMARTClient) but not documented
OSX with MacVidCards NVMe driver - nvme-cli tool distributed with the driver IOCTL format is not documented, driver is closed source
Oracle Solaris 11.2+ - nvmeadm Interface is not documented
IllumOS NVMe driver - not yet implemented no management interface/tool yet implemented
Windows with OpenFabrics compatible NVMe driver Various vendor specific tools Devices are accessed via NVME_PASS_THROUGH I/O-control. Successfully tested with NVMe drivers from Intel, OCZ and Samsung. Does not work with Intel RST driver or Microsoft driver.
Windows 7 to 2012.R2 with Microsoft NVMe driver (✓) - ?? Older Microsoft NVMe drivers do not provide a NVMe pass-through I/O-control.
Windows 10 with Microsoft NVMe driver - ?? IOCTL_STORAGE_PROTOCOL_COMMAND is not yet supported by smartmontools.

Development notes

Development and debugging could be performed using 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.

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