Alan, Anton Blanchard reported a lock vs. interrupt-off ordering bug in migration_thread. The bug is already fixed in 2.5. A patch is attached to fix O(1) in your tree. See the comments above double_rq_lock and double_rq_unlock (which, sadly, I wrote)! Without this patch there is a possibility to hang, which Anton observed. Patch is against 2.4.19-pre8-ac1, please apply. Robert Love