Dave Hansen wrote:

I was handed off a bug report about a blade not booting with a, um
"newer" kernel.

If you're unable to provide basic information such as the kernel
version then perhaps this isn't the best forum for discussing this.  :)

I'm thinking that we need to at least fix careful_allocation() to oops
and not return NULL, or check to make sure all it callers check its
return code.

Well, careful_allocation() in current mainline tries pretty hard to
panic if it can't satisfy the request.  Why isn't that happening?