As some may know a few different brands of Samsung SSD’s can potentially need a firmware update if you’re seeing issues with them, the 980, 990 series are the most affected. Samsung has published Firmware updates sadly it seems the easiest way to get these is via the windows only Samsung magic app.
This lists a bunch of linux ISO’s you can boot to update the firmware.
But I was wondering since it’s just a bootable linux system, is there an app we can just install (package or build from source)
Or any other easier more tested option people have used for these types of firmware updates?
if you go down to the “Firmware” toggle on that page you can see they are all ISO’s and if you download the doc’s from that area as well, it explains they are bootable ISO’s
probably - but in order to update the firmware of the device
it’s probably better to not be relying on any software that is stored on this self same device
(updating the firmware while the device is in active use is likely not a good idea …)
At the page you reference (and thank you VERY much for providing this!!), if you scroll down to the Firmware section and expand it, there is an NVMe SSD-Firmware Installation Guide (and also one for SATA SSD) – opening that up provides some answers for us.
The firmware updates provided on this page are “bootable ISOs” and the Installation Guide refers them as Linux-based and also (in its Glossary section) as DOS-based. Either way, the important thing is that one does NOT need to be running Windows to use these update utilities. All one has to do is to have the system boot into this ISO and it will search for Samsung SSDs and offer to update them. Whether it uses Linux or DOS makes no difference as it’s all contained within the ISO.
The Utility User Manual says to use UNetbootin to create the Live USB, but I’m sure Ventoy would work just as well.