slab fragmentation by first getting rid of all partial allocated slabs on every node before allocating new memory. If we cannot satisfy the allocation from any per node queue then we extend a slab. We now call into the page allocator without specifying GFP_THISNODE. The page allocator will then implement its own fallback (in the given cpuset context), perform necessary reclaim (again considering not a single node but the whole set of allowed nodes) and then return pages for a new slab. We identify from which node the pages were allocated and then insert the pages into the corresponding per node structure. In order to do so we need to modify cache_grow() to take a parameter that specifies the new slab. kmem_getpages() can no longer set the GFP_THISNODE flag since we need to be able to use kmem_getpage to allocate from an arbitrary node. GFP_THISNODE needs to be specified when calling cache_grow(). One key advantage is that the decision from which node to allocate new memory is removed from slab fallback processing. The patch allows to go back to use of the page allocators fallback/reclaim logic. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds Ü