» openSUSE 10.2 vs Dell Optiplex GX270

And another annoyance after upgrading to 10.2, again with my workstation @work. It's a Dell Optiplex GX270 and it definitely seems to have a borked SATA controller. When booting, it takes around 2 minutes for the ata_piix module to notice there's no disk on the SATA controllers (note that the SATA controllers are even disabled in the BIOS). It comes up with this:

libata version 2.00 loaded.
ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: version 2.00ac7
ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: MAP [ P0 -- P1 -- ]
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.2[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 169
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.2 to 64
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFE00 ctl 0xFE12 bmdma 0xFEA0 irq 169
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFE20 ctl 0xFE32 bmdma 0xFEA8 irq 169
scsi0 : ata_piix
ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xff)
ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs, Status 0xff)
ata1: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata1: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata1: softreset failed, retrying in 5 secs
ata1: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata1: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata1: softreset failed, retrying in 5 secs
ata1: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata1: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata1: reset failed, giving up

Ok, not that much of a problem, it just takes a little longer to boot (that's when I go grab a cup of coffee anyway). Unfortunately, this workaround didn't help. Here's the LKML thread about it and it seems the patch has been approved and merged upstream. And with some luck it will be included in the next kernel upgrade patch ;)