Intel RST 21.0.0.1033: NVMe Vendor Specific Command (Data-In) issue via IOCTL_SCSI_MINIPORT

[wkao]

Hi Intel Support and Engineers,

I am an SSD tool developer and I am currently facing a issue regarding NVMe Pass-through commands on the Intel RST VMD driver (version 21.0.0.1033).

I use IOCTL_SCSI_MINIPORT with the "IntelNvm" signature to send NVMe admin commands to our SSDs for debugging and vendor-specific operations. While this approach works fine on older RST versions (e.g., 19.0.0.1067), the behavior has changed in RST 21.0.0.1033.

Symptom Description:

1. Standard Commands Work: Standard Admin commands like Identify (0x06) & Get Log Page(0x02) work perfectly fine. The data is correctly copied back to the buffer.

2. Vendor Commands Fail (Get the wrong buffer back): When sending a Vendor Specific Admin Command (Opcode 0xC2, which is a Data-In command), DeviceIoControl returns TRUE (Success). But I did not get the correct buffer back from the SSD.

3. I did not face the issue above on IRST 19.0.0.1067, it only happened on IRST21.0.0.1033.

(Note: I also tried using Microsoft's standard IOCTL_STORAGE_PROTOCOL_COMMAND as an alternative, but it immediately returned FALSE with GetLastError() == 1 (ERROR_INVALID_FUNCTION) under this VMD environment.)

My Questions:

1. What is Intel's officially recommended method or IOCTL to send NVMe Vendor Specific Commands (with Data-In) to an SSD under IRST 21.0.0.1033?
2. Why do I get the wrong buffer under IRST 21.0.0.1033, while the exact same code and structure worked perfectly fine under IRST 19.0.0.1067? Is there a new security restriction?

Thanks,

Wkao

It happened on both my win10 and win11, the SSU log as attachment.