i suspect it's the LOCK overhead. If it's a single-CPU system, then could
you edit asm-i386/atomic.h, and do:
#define LOCK ""
even if it's compiled as SMP? It might be that LOCK prefix overhead is
huge on the 686. You'll still have true spinlock behavior and semantics.
generally, the APIC(s) is rarely touched except at initialization time. So
it cant really be the APIC stuff. And it's _never_ supposed to be touched
if it's not detected at bootup ...
-- mingo
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