at happened was that gcc reordered this so that 'save_pending = pending'
came before 'signals_enabled = 1', creating a one-instruction window within
which an interrupt could arrive, set its bit in pending, and have it be
immediately erased.

When the I/O workload is purely disk-based, the loss of a block device
interrupt stops the entire I/O system because the next block request will
wait for the current one to finish.  Thus the system hangs until something
else causes some I/O to arrive, such as a network packet or console input.

The fix to this particular problem is a memory barrier between enabling
signals and reading the pending signal mask.  An xchg would also probably
work.

Looking over this code for similar problems led me to do a few more
things:

- make signals_enabled and pending volatile so that they don't get cached
  in registers

- add an mb() to the return paths of block_signals and unblock_signals so
  that the modification of signals_enabled doesn't get shuffled into the
  caller in the event that these are inlined in the future.

Signed-off-by: Jeff Dike <jdike@addtoit.com>
Cc: Paolo 'Blaisorblade' Giarrusso <blaisorblade@yahoo.it>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
e