[Not replying inline as my mail is bouncing back] This patch is based on reading the code rather than a kernel crash. My thought process was that if an invalid node id was passed to __alloc_pages_node, it would be better to add a VM_WARN_ON and fail the allocation rather than crashing the kernel. I feel it would be better to fail the allocation early in the hot path if an invalid node id is passed. This is irrespective of whether the VM_[BUG|WARN]_*s are enabled or not. I do not see any checks in the hot path for the node id, which in turn may cause NODE_DATA(nid) to fail to get the pglist_data pointer for the node id. We can optimise the branch by wrapping it around in unlikely(), if performance is the issue? What are your thoughts on this? Thank you Bharath