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

Fine. But, why are we hitting fallback_alloc() in the first place? It's 
definitely not because of missing ->nodelists as we do:

        cache_cache.nodelists[node] = &initkmem_list3[CACHE_CACHE];

before attempting to set up kmalloc caches. Now, if I understood 
correctly, we're booting off a memoryless node so kmem_getpages() will 
return NULL thus forcing us to fallback_alloc() which is unavailable at 
this point.

As far as I can tell, there are two ways to fix this:

  (1) don't boot off a memoryless node (why are we doing this in the first 
      place?)

Right. That is the solution that I would prefer.

  (2) initialize cache_cache.nodelists with initmem_list3 equivalents
      for *each node hat has normal memory*

Or simply do it for all. SLAB bootstrap is very complex thing though.

I am still wondering why this worked before, though.

I doubt it did ever work for SLAB.