On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Pekka J Enberg wrote:

Furthermore, don't let kmem_getpages() call alloc_pages_node() if nodeid passed
to it is -1 as the latter will always translate that to numa_node_id() which
might not have ->nodelist that caused the invocation of fallback_alloc() in the
first place (for example, during bootstrap).

kmem_getpages is called without GFP_THISNODE. This 
alloc_pages_node(numa_node_id(), ...) will fall back to the next node with 
memory.