panic and timer interrupts?

[linas at austin.ibm.com]

I've got a machine here that just did one of the stranger kernel
things I've ever seen. Due to some bug, it panic'ed. But then, during
the panic, it took a timer interrupt, and then handled some network
interrupts, handled some network data, and seems to maybe even have
scheduled some user-land processes before getting hoplessly tangled up.

So, my naive kernel questions as follows: I would have thought that
interrupts would be disabled during a panic, but I can't find any code
that does this. Why is this? Is this a bug? Is this intentional?

It got me to thinking about a hang mode I've seen not infrequently
on PC's: Machine is hung, unresponsive to keyboard, telnet, etc. but
does reply to pings. I've never bothered to debug those, but now I'm
wondering if that's a related manifestation.

--linas

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