ATA resetting when accessing DVDs (VIA 8237A controller)

[Simon Andrews]

Nico Sabbi wrote:
> Il Sunday 17 February 2008 10:29:03 dexter ha scritto:
>> On Sat February 16 2008 08:50:48 Nico Sabbi wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> I have those very frequent resets when accessing my IDE dvd, especially
>>> (but not only) after a cold boot.
>>>
>>> UDF-fs INFO UDF 0.9.8.1 (2004/29/09) Mounting volume 'ATONEMENT', timestamp
>>> 2007/11/09 03:21 (103c) ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0
>>> action 0x2 frozen
>>> ata3.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x1e data 0
>>>          res 40/00:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
>>> ata3: soft resetting port
>>> ata3: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xd0)
>>> ata3: SRST failed (errno=-16)

>> It doesn't look that serious 'I think', hit bugzilla and look at these for 
>> more info #243238 #245426 add to or open at your leisure.

> looking at those bugzilla entries the issue seems to be still unfixed; it is a serious
> problem: every kind of cd/dvd access from that point onward requires a reboot.
> Apparently libata is to blame; I'll recompile the kernel without libata
> (hoping that both SATA and PATA are still accessible) until that bug is fixed 

I've also got this problem (BZ#379771).  In my case and many others the 
work round is to add the following to the kernel boot options:

libata.pata_dma=1

It's still annoying that this has been hanging around for so long.

Simon.