NVMe support is missing

[Michael Stucki]

I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon 4th Generation containing an NVMe disk. This is currently not supported by smartmontools in Ubuntu 16.04.

According to the info at https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/NVMe_Support this support was only added in version 6.5. However, Ubuntu 16.04 still uses version 6.4.

[Joshua Powers (powersj)]

Thank you for taking the time to report and help to make Ubuntu better.

If you need a fix for the bug in previous versions of Ubuntu, then the relevant procedure is documented here:

 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates

However, I am not sure this bug would qualify under that policy, although I am not on the SRU team and cannot make that decision. The upcoming release of Ubuntu, Yakkety, will contain version 6.5:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/yakkety/smartmontools

[Michael Stucki (mstucki)]

Thanks for your feedback. I think that the situation is covered by 2.2 of the SRU document:

> For Long Term Support releases we regularly want to enable new hardware. Such changes are
> appropriate provided that we can ensure not to affect upgrades on existing hardware. For
> example, modaliases of newly introduced drivers must not overlap with previously shipped
> drivers. This also includes updating hardware description data such as udev's keymaps,
> media-player-info, mobile broadband vendors, or PCI vendor/product list updates.

On the other hand, the hardware works well even without the new smartmontools. It's just that the purpose of smartmontools is exactly to find out if it's working or not, and we can't know for sure without...

I made a quick comparison of the releases 6.4 and 6.5:
https://www.smartmontools.org/changeset?old_path=%2Ftags%2FRELEASE_6_4%2Fsmartmontools&old=&new_path=%2Ftags%2FRELEASE_6_5%2Fsmartmontools&new=&sfp_email=&sfph_mail=

That's a lot of changes. On the other hand, backporting of the NVMe related changesets seems to be spread over many commits, so I'm not sure if that is the better option...

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for smartmontools (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[htrex (hantarex)]

A lot of new hardware is shipping with NVMe SSDs and an early warning of bad disks parameters may be essential to avoid bigger troubles.
What about releasing the 6.5 package in the Xenial repo?