Intermittent hang at "Bringing up secondary CPUs" during soft reboot on RHEL 9.5 and later (Azure/Hyper-V)

Issue

• A RHEL 9.5 and later guests running on Microsoft Azure Generation 2 intermittently hangs during a soft reboot ( systemctl reboot).
• Systems freeze at the kernel symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) initialization phase, specifically at "smp: Bringing up secondary CPUs ..." instruction and require a manual hard reset:

[ 0.438264] Mountpoint-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 4, 65536 bytes, linear)
[ 0.438264] smpboot: CPU0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8370C CPU @ 2.80GHz (family: 0x6, model: 0x6a, stepping: 0x6)
[ 0.438443] Performance Events: unsupported p6 CPU model 106 no PMU driver, software events only.
[ 0.439293] signal: max sigframe size: 3632
[ 0.440328] rcu: Hierarchical SRCU implementation.
[ 0.440329] rcu: Max phase no-delay instances is 400.
[ 0.445519] NMI watchdog: Perf NMI watchdog permanently disabled
[ 0.446333] smp: Bringing up secondary CPUs ...

• No memory dump file, such as vmcore, is generated because the hang occurs at a hardware/hypervisor level before a kernel panic could trigger.