I suppose I'm confused, but I recall that link resets are non-fatal.
Fatal errors typically require that the the pci adapter be completely
reset, any adapter firmware to be reloaded from scratch, the device
driver has to kill all device state and start from scratch. Its huge.
If the fatal error is on pci device that is under a block device
holding a file system, then (usually) there is no way to recover,
because the block layer (and file system) cannot deal with a block
device that disappeared and then reappeared some few seconds later.
(maybe some future zfs or lvm or btrfs might be able to deal with
this, but not today)