When I cleaned up printk() and split up the printk locking logic in
commit 
266c2e0abeca649fa6667a1a427ad1da507c6375 ("Make printk() console
semaphore accesses sensible") I had incorrectly 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 <bonganilinux@mweb.co.za>
Cc: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
 {
        int retval = 0;
 
-       if (can_use_console(cpu))
-               retval = !try_acquire_console_sem();
+       if (!try_acquire_console_sem()) {
+               retval = 1;
+
+               /*
+                * If we can't use the console, we need to release
+                * the console semaphore by hand to avoid flushing
+                * the buffer. We need to hold the console semaphore
+                * in order to do this test safely.
+                */
+               if (!can_use_console(cpu)) {
+                       console_locked = 0;
+                       up(&console_sem);
+                       retval = 0;
+               }
+       }
        printk_cpu = UINT_MAX;
        spin_unlock(&logbuf_lock);
        return retval;