On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 05:59:38PM +0100, Kevin D. Kissell wrote: > There have been times when having local_irq_enable() in my idle loop > would have prevented a hang in some of my experimental kernels, too, > but it's always been because I had screwed up somewhere else and > forgotten to re-enable interrupts. Is there some good reason why > the kernel should end up in idle with interrupts turned off? No, never. It'd result in the scheduler being called with interrupts disabled which depending if you're lucky or not may happen to reenable interrupts or not, so you're outside of defined behaviour starting that point. Ralf