Disabling interrupts and masking interrupts

Hello, what is the difference between disabling interrupts and masking interrupts ? Disabling interrupts is done, AFAIK, with irq_disable(). (see below) Can someone gives an example of how to mask interrupts with x86/x86_64 ? irq_disable() in x86 goes to native_irq_disable(), which eventually calls assembler "cli" command: CLI clears the IF bit in the flags. static inline void native_irq_disable(void) { asm volatile("cli": : :"memory"); } see arch/x86/include/asm/irqflags.h rgs, Kevin