Diff between 2.4.5pre6aa1 and 2.4.5aa1: Only in 2.4.5pre6aa1: 00_alpha-cypress-quirk-1 Only in 2.4.5pre6aa1: 00_alpha-dp264-compile-1 Only in 2.4.5pre6aa1: 00_alpha-iommu-tlb-corruption-1 Only in 2.4.5pre6aa1: 00_alpha-ksyms-1 Only in 2.4.5pre6aa1: 00_alpha-large-vmalloc-1 Only in 2.4.5pre6aa1: 00_buffer-2 Only in 2.4.5pre6aa1: 00_highmem-deadlock-3 All them merged in 2.4.5 mainline. Only in 2.4.5aa1: 00_create_buffers-deadlock-1 Fix tasks possibly deadlocking in wait_event because the unused_list isn't refilled at I/O completion anymore with the 2.4 pagecache(/swapcache) design. Only in 2.4.5aa1: 00_gfp_buffer-alloc-pages-deadlock-1 Fix from Rik that avoids GFP_BUFFER to deadlock inside alloc_pages(). This is by no means a definitive fix for the VM deadlocks during oom, all other __GFP_IO allocations can still dealdock inside alloc_pages() like before. But it is a first step in the right direction I think. Please try to beat 2.4.5aa1 hard and see if you can reproduce deadlocks with highmem.