Mikulas Patoka wants to ensure that no fallback to lower order happens. I think __GFP_NORETRY should work correctly in that case too and not fall back. Allocating at a smaller order is a retry operation and should not be attempted. If the caller does not want retries then respect that. GFP_NORETRY allows callers to ensure that only maximum order allocations are attempted. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@xxxxxxxxx> Index: linux/mm/slub.c =================================================================== --- linux.orig/mm/slub.c +++ linux/mm/slub.c @@ -1598,7 +1598,7 @@ static struct page *allocate_slab(struct alloc_gfp = (alloc_gfp | __GFP_NOMEMALLOC) & ~(__GFP_RECLAIM|__GFP_NOFAIL); page = alloc_slab_page(s, alloc_gfp, node, oo); - if (unlikely(!page)) { + if (unlikely(!page) && !(flags & __GFP_NORETRY)) { oo = s->min; alloc_gfp = flags; /*