igrate the process to another numa node occured while the irq block had been dropped. The solution is to make cache_alloc_refill reload these variables whenever it drops and reacquires the irq block. The error is very difficult to hit. When it does occur, one gets the following oops + stack traceback bits in check_spinlock_acquired: kernel BUG at mm/slab.c:2417 cache_alloc_refill+0xe6 kmem_cache_alloc+0xd0 ... This patch was developed against 2.6.23, ported to and compiled-tested only against 2.6.25-rc4. Signed-off-by: Joe Korty Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter òù—˜›2x