On 2025-01-30 10:53:19 [-0800], Paul E. McKenney wrote:

The timer and hrtimer softirq processing has moved to dedicated threads
for kernels built with CONFIG_IRQ_FORCED_THREADING=y.  This results in
timers not expiring until later in early boot, which in turn causes the
RCU Tasks self-tests to hang in kernels built with CONFIG_PROVE_RCU=y,
which further causes the entire kernel to hang.  One fix would be to
make timers work during this time, but there are no known users of RCU
Tasks grace periods during that time, so no justification for the added
complexity.  Not yet, anyway.

This commit therefore moves the call to rcu_init_tasks_generic() from
kernel_init_freeable() to a core_initcall().  This works because the
timer and hrtimer kthreads are created at early_initcall() time.

Fixes: 49a17639508c3 ("softirq: Use a dedicated thread for timer wakeups on PREEMPT_RT.")
?

I played with it and I can reproduce the issue with !RT + threadirqs but
not with RT (which implies threadirqs).
Is there anything in RT that avoids the problem?

Thank you for debugging and the patch. 

Sebastian