Comment 16 for bug 220706

Tested with Xubuntu Intrepid alpha 5 x86_64.

I tested again on Asus P5N-E SLI board (BIOS rev. 0901) , 4 Gb RAM, Core2 Duo 8200.
Pioneer DVR-215D. Again I the DVD drive is not recognised.
Error messages have changed somewhat. The hard reset loop is now gone. The boot
process just halts.

dmesg:
ata4: SRST failed (errno=-16)
ata4: link online but device misclassified, retrying
ata4: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=-19)
ata4: SRST failed (errno=-16)
ata4: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) <== Device can handle max 1.5 Gbps anyway
ata4: link online but device misclassified, retrying
ata4: limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps
ata4: SRST failed (errno=-16)
ata4: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
ata4: link online but device misclassified, device detection might fail
(2 more messages)

I contacted Tejun Heo asking him about http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/8/20/51
(same as patch attached)
and he said this patch would go upstream, since the "early" Nvidia chipsets
have problems. Here is an explanation from Tejun Heo:

"
Well, it looks like some of the earlier nv's just can't cope with
hardresetting. It was okay before not because hardreset worked but it
wasn't simply used. Hotplugging doesn't have any direct dependence on
hardreset as long as PHY event is delivered. Hotplug and hardreset
usually go together as virtually all controllers which support PHY
events implement SCRs which can be used to hardreset.

Anyways, without hardreset, the only lost functionality is to handle
some exotic malfunctioning device cases and ability to unlock some
limitations BIOS has put, both of which should be too big a problem in
most cases.
"

Thanks