Mark Lord wrote:

I believe he said it was ICH5 (different post/thread).

My observation on ICH5 is that if one unplugs a drive,
then the chipset/cpu locks up hard when toggling SRST
in the EH code.

Specifically, it locks up at the instruction
which restores SRST back to the non-asserted state,
which likely corresponds to the chipset finally actually
sending a FIS to the drive.

A hard(ware) lockup, not software.
That's why Intel says ICH5 doesn't do hotplug.

OIC.  I don't think there's much left to do from the driver side then.
Or is there any workaround?

-- 
tejun