When a secondary CPU is being brought up, it is not uncommon for
printk() to be invoked when cpu_online(smp_processor_id()) == 0.  The
case that I witnessed personally was on MIPS:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/5/30/4

If (can_use_console() == 0), printk() will spool its output to log_buf
and it will be visible in "dmesg", but that output will NOT be echoed to
the console until somebody calls release_console_sem() from a CPU that
is online.  Therefore, the boot time messages from the new CPU can get
stuck in "limbo" for a long time, and might suddenly appear on the
screen when a completely unrelated event (e.g. "eth0: link is down")
occurs.

This patch modifies the console code so that any pending messages are
automatically flushed out to the console whenever a CPU hotplug
operation completes successfully or aborts.

The issue was seen on 2.6.34.

Original patch by Kevin Cernekee with cleanups by akpm and additional fixes
by Santosh Shilimkar.  This patch superseeds
https://patchwork.linux-mips.org/patch/1357/

.

Signed-off-by: Kevin Cernekee <cernekee@gmail.com>
To: <mingo@elte.hu>
To: <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: <simon.kagstrom@netinsight.net>
To: <David.Woodhouse@intel.com>
To: <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Cc: <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: <linux-mips@linux-mips.org>
Reviewed-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Cernekee <cernekee@gmail.com>
Patchwork: https://patchwork.linux-mips.org/patch/1534/


LKML-Reference: <ede63b5a20af951c755736f035d1e787772d7c28@localhost>
LKML-Reference: <EAF47CD23C76F840A9E7FCE10091EFAB02C5DB6D1F@dbde02.ent.ti.com>
Signed-off-by: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>