the attached pae-2.4.3-C3 patch fixes the PAE code to work with SLAB FORCED_DEBUG (which enables redzoning) too. the problem is that redzoning is enabled unconditionally, and SLAB has no information about how crutial alignment is in the case of any particular SLAB cache. The CPU generates a general protection fault if in PAE mode a non-16-byte aligned pgd is loaded into %cr3. Redzoning is very useful and most caches use HWCACHE_ALIGN, so i didnt want to disable redzoning if SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN is set. The patch adds SLAB_MUST_HWCACHE_ALIGN, which makes the distinction. the patch is against 2.4.3-pre8 (applies cleanly to ac26 as well), and compiles & boot cleanly in PAE mode, with or without CONFIG_DEBUG_SLAB. The kernel also compiles cleanly in non-PAE mode. (the patch also introduces the pae_pgd SLAB cache, which is a tiny speedup.) Ingo