Machine slowdown or lockup, massive rate of logging seen on console

Issue

• Slowdown of the machine is observed, accompanied by stack traces and massive logging on the console (tty). This can go as far as leading to a crash or softlockup.
• Console logging has been known to produce soft lockups, hard lockups, NTP or time instability, and can cause various other similar issues.
• The behavior is triggered by any high rate logging to the tty console (which is framebuffer by default), a typical situation is using iptables LOG target, and generating or encountering massive traffic that is matched by the -j LOG rules.
• One example of such traffic seen was being generated for security auditing, another was generated "naturally" in a Windows network by Samba NetBIOS broadcast.
• Hardlockup or soft lockup panic in framebuffer due to repeated kernel printk.
• Lockup in framebuffer console like:

Call Trace:
 [<ffffffff80182784>] cfb_fillrect+0x1ed/0x2f6
 [<ffffffff8017beb0>] fbcon_redraw+0x130/0x169
 [<ffffffff8017f07e>] bit_putcs+0x42b/0x481
 [<ffffffff80156347>] __next_cpu+0x19/0x28
 [<ffffffff8017f564>] bit_cursor+0x490/0x4ac
 [<ffffffff8017a2cb>] fbcon_putcs+0x20e/0x260
 [<ffffffff8017ec53>] bit_putcs+0x0/0x481
 [<ffffffff8017be53>] fbcon_redraw+0xd3/0x169

• Lockups detected like NMI Watchdog detected LOCKUP on CPU #