Hi Johannes,

I hope Dan and Jerry also reply but I have recently started looking at
this too and have some comments below.

On 7/27/2016 6:35 AM, Johannes Thumshirn wrote:
> Hi Dan and Jerry,
> 
> I'm currently looking into SMART data retrieval on HPE NVDIMMs.
> 
> After the first obstacle (like getting cat
> /sys/class/nd/ndctl0/device/nmem0/commands reutrn smart so ndctl will issue
> the ioctl) I ran into a rather nasty problem. According to [1] HPEDIMMs
> need the input buffer specially crafted for SMART data, according to [2]
> Intel DIMMs don't.

It is unfortunate that the DSM functions are different for different NVDIMM

types.  There is a desire for standardization but for now this is what we have.

> Adding translation functions for the DIMMs accepted commands is one thing and
> should be more or less trivial for all DIMMs (I'll post an RFC patch as soon
> as Linus merged Dan's 4.8 pull request so I can rebase it) but doing this
> type of conversation for each and every command for every defined vendor
> family for both the input and output buffers will drive us all mad I guess.

In my opinion, I don't think we need ndctl to be able to issue every function
and decode every response but I would like to see the --health option to report
the "SMART and Health" data reported by functions 1 and 2.  I could be wrong
but I think that's all it does for the NVDIMMs that use the Intel example DSM.

There are functions in libndctl that issue other DSMs but I don't think
those aren't used by the ndctl command itself.  Whether we need the other
functions in libndctl to work with non-Intel DSM devices is still TBD.

> Especially from the distribution's POV I'm not to keen on having customers
> with some new NVDIMM family and we would need to re-implement all the
> translators again. Adding a new ID is one thing but translation tables are a
> totally different story.
> 
> So the question is have I overlooked something and there is a clean and easy
> solution to this problem, or not.

I don't think it's clean and easy today.  I think it needs to be made a bit
more modular to handle the NVDIMMs that have DSMs implemented using the
pass-through mode.

> @Jerry have you tested SMART data retrieval with ndctl? Did it work for you?

I tried it and it does not work.

-- ljk
> 
> Thanks,
>       Johannes
> 
> [1] 
> https://github.com/HewlettPackard/hpe-nvm/blob/master/Documentation/NFIT_DSM_DDR4_NVDIMM-N_v84s.pdf
> [2] http://pmem.io/documents/NVDIMM_DSM_Interface_Example-V1.2.pdf
> 
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