A few vendors have been testing the NVMe firmware update code, and so far so good; soon we should have three more storage vendors moving firmware to stable. A couple of vendors also wanted to use the hdparm binary to update SATA hardware that’s not using the NVMe specification. A quick recap of the difference:

NVMe: Faster, more expensive controller, one cut-out in the M.2 PCB header

SATA: Slower, less expensive to implement, standard SATA or PATA connector, or two cut-outs in the M.2 PCB header

I’ve just merged a plugin developed with the donation of hardware and support of Star Labs. Any ATA-compatible drive (even DVD drives) supporting ATA_OP_DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE should be updatable using this new plugin, but you need to verify the TransferMode (e.g. 0x3 , 0x7 or 0xe ) before attempting an update to prevent data loss. Rather than calling into hdparm and screenscraping the output, we actually set up the sg_io_hdr_t structure and CDB buffer in the fwupd plugin to ensure it always works reliably without any additional dependencies. We only use two ATA commands and we can share a lot of the infrastructure with other plugins. For nearly all protocols, on nearly all devices, updating firmware is really a very similar affair.

There should soon be firmware on the LVFS that updates the StarDrive in the Star Lite laptop. I opened up the Star Lite today to swap the M.2 SSD to one with an old version and was amazed to find that it’s 80% battery inside; it reminded me of the inside of an iPad. Really impressive engineering considering the performance.