rrectly moved the call to have_callable_console() outside of the console semaphore. That was buggy. The console semaphore protects the console_drivers list that is used by have_callable_console(). Thanks go to Bongani Hlope who saw this as a hang on shutdown and reboot and bisected the bug to the right commit, and tested this patch. See http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/4/11/315 Bisected-and-tested-by: Bongani Hlope Cc: Alexey Dobriyan Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds Íb^Ò’$x