I'm running in to the same issue (integration with Gerrit Trigger). This doesn't prevent checkout, it just causes Jenkins to clear the workspace so that my build completely starts over, which can take 45 minutes, when it could take 1 or 2. This is a significant problem for us. I'd rather not downgrade as I would have to reconfigure many jobs to specify the ref location (like I did when I upgraded from the older git client).
Fetching changes from the remote Git repository
Fetching upstream changes from git://repo.dev.systemware.com/xds
Checking out Revision 407f296d95c4626e65647e50573f6a2ad08b0eef (master)
ERROR: Unable to retrieve changeset
hudson.plugins.git.GitException: Failed to find parent id.
at com.sonyericsson.hudson.plugins.gerrit.trigger.hudsontrigger.GerritTriggerBuildChooser.getFirstParent(GerritTriggerBuildChooser.java:156)
at com.sonyericsson.hudson.plugins.gerrit.trigger.hudsontrigger.GerritTriggerBuildChooser.prevBuildForChangelog(GerritTriggerBuildChooser.java:117)
at hudson.plugins.git.GitSCM.computeChangeLog(GitSCM.java:935)
at hudson.plugins.git.GitSCM.checkout(GitSCM.java:875)
at hudson.model.AbstractProject.checkout(AbstractProject.java:1376)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.defaultCheckout(AbstractBuild.java:655)
at jenkins.scm.SCMCheckoutStrategy.checkout(SCMCheckoutStrategy.java:88)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.run(AbstractBuild.java:560)
at hudson.model.Run.execute(Run.java:1592)
at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:46)
at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:88)
at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:237)
Caused by: java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException
at org.jenkinsci.plugins.gitclient.RemoteGitImpl.getRepository(RemoteGitImpl.java:187)
at com.sonyericsson.hudson.plugins.gerrit.trigger.hudsontrigger.GerritTriggerBuildChooser.getFirstParent(GerritTriggerBuildChooser.java:146)
... 11 more
Cleaning workspace
please attach full polling log for diagnostic.