How I Got --wait and --repeat Added to nvme-cli

By Yonas Abeselom — June 20, 2026

Two weeks ago I published a GitHub repository from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Today, the core idea behind it was merged into linux-nvme/nvme-cli master — the standard NVMe command-line tool that ships with virtually every Linux distribution.

This is the story of how that happened, and why it matters.

The problem I couldn't stop thinking about

When you sanitize an NVMe drive on Linux, the standard workflow looks like this:

nvme sanitize /dev/nvme0 --sanact=2

The command returns immediately. The drive acknowledges receipt. You move on.

But here is the thing: NVMe Sanitize (Opcode 0x84) is asynchronous. The drive accepts the command instantly and then performs the actual erasure in the background — sometimes for seconds, sometimes for minutes, depending on the drive's capacity and the sanitize action requested. The host has no idea whether the operation completed correctly, or at all, until it polls Log Page 0x81 (the Sanitize Status log page) and checks the SSTAT field.

The current nvme sanitize command does not do that polling. It fires the command and returns. Most operators never separately check completion.

I confirmed this on RFC #3415 with nvme-cli contributor ikegami-t, who verified: "The sanitize command does not poll the log page but just only submit the command and return the status if any error caused."

This is the fire-and-forget gap. And it has a real consequence: if drive firmware silently fails a sanitize operation — which Wei et al. documented happening in 3 of 12 drives they tested at USENIX FAST 2011 — the operator has no way to know. The command returned success. The log says success. The data is still there.

What Wei et al. actually found

The peer-reviewed foundation for this concern is a 2011 paper by Michael Wei, Laura Grupp, Frederick Spada, and Steven Swanson at UC San Diego: "Reliably Erasing Data from Flash-Based Solid State Drives," USENIX FAST 2011.

They tested 12 drives with built-in sanitize commands. Only 4 of 12 executed correctly. One drive reported the sanitize command completed successfully while all data remained completely intact. The drive lied.

Their conclusion was unambiguous: reliable SSD sanitization requires built-in, verifiable sanitize operations — not just operations that claim to verify themselves.

That paper is from 2011, on ATA/SCSI drives. NVMe has since replaced ATA as the dominant interface. But the firmware fault pattern Wei et al. documented is interface-agnostic — NVMe drive firmware can contain the same class of bugs. And until two weeks ago, the standard Linux NVMe tooling still had no mechanism for verifying that a sanitize operation actually completed.

What I built

I built AAD-50 (the Abeselom ASIC-Direct 50) — a 50-cycle NVMe sanitization framework that addresses the verification gap directly. The core architectural decision: after every single sanitize cycle, AAD-50 polls Log Page 0x81 and refuses to advance until SSTAT = 0x1 confirms hardware completion. If a cycle fails, the operation aborts immediately and writes a fault record to the audit log.

The full protocol runs a B → C → A phase matrix across 50 cycles: 40 cycles of physical NAND cell overwrite, 5 cycles of FTL translation map teardown, and 5 cycles of cryptographic media key destruction. It generates a SHA-256 tamper-evident audit chain and a PDF Certificate of Destruction for compliance purposes.

It is written entirely in Python — including the low-level IOCTL and NVMe passthrough work — and runs on both Linux and Windows. Everything is free and open source at

Update — June 17, 2026

The day after the nvme-cli merge, I opened RFC #308 on hiyohiyo/CrystalDiskInfo — the most widely used Windows NVMe and disk health tool, with hundreds of millions of downloads — proposing the same Log Page 0x81 sanitize completion verification architecture for Windows.

This is the Windows equivalent of what RFC #3415 achieved on Linux. If accepted, the verification gap fix would reach mainstream Windows users through a tool already installed on an enormous number of machines worldwide.

RFC #308:

RFC #3415: