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The X86_32-only disable_hlt/enable_hlt mechanism was used by the
32-bit floppy driver. Its effect was to replace the use of the
HLT instruction inside default_idle() with cpu_relax() - essentially
it turned off the use of HLT.

This workaround was commented in the code as:

 "disable hlt during certain critical i/o operations"

 "This halt magic was a workaround for ancient floppy DMA
  wreckage. It should be safe to remove."

H. Peter Anvin additionally adds:

 "To the best of my knowledge, no-hlt only existed because of
  flaky power distributions on 386/486 systems which were sold to
  run DOS.  Since DOS did no power management of any kind,
  including HLT, the power draw was fairly uniform; when exposed
  to the much hhigher noise levels you got when Linux used HLT
  caused some of these systems to fail.

  They were by far in the minority even back then."

Alan Cox further says:

 "Also for the Cyrix 5510 which tended to ...