arly ptr to be NULL, and if not then it's still valid. Otherwise, the per_cpu variable is used instead: #define early_per_cpu(_name, _cpu) \ (early_per_cpu_ptr(_name) ? \ early_per_cpu_ptr(_name)[_cpu] : \ per_cpu(_name, _cpu)) A better method is to actually check the pointer manually. In the case below, numa_set_node can be called both "early" and "late": void __cpuinit numa_set_node(int cpu, int node) { int *cpu_to_node_map = early_per_cpu_ptr(x86_cpu_to_node_map); if (cpu_to_node_map) cpu_to_node_map[cpu] = node; else per_cpu(x86_cpu_to_node_map, cpu) = node; } * Add a flag "arch_provides_topology_pointers" that indicates pointers to topology cpumask_t maps are available. Otherwise, use the function returning the cpumask_t value. This is useful if cpumask_t set size is very large to avoid copying data on to/off of the stack. * The coverage of CONFIG_DEBUG_PER_CPU_MAPS has been increased while the non-debug case has been optimized a bit. * Remove an unreferenced compiler warning in drivers/base/topology.c * Clean up #ifdef in setup.c For inclusion into sched-devel/latest tree. Based on: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git + sched-devel/latest .../mingo/linux-2.6-sched-devel.git Signed-off-by: Mike Travis Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner 8íÓ3˜)x