diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/numastat.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/numastat.rst
index aaf1667489f8..08ec2c2bdce3 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/numastat.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/numastat.rst
@@ -6,6 +6,21 @@ Numa policy hit/miss statistics
 
 All units are pages. Hugepages have separate counters.
 
+The numa_hit, numa_miss and numa_foreign counters reflect how well processes
+are able to allocate memory from nodes they prefer. If they succeed, numa_hit
+is incremented on the preferred node, otherwise numa_foreign is incremented on
+the preferred node and numa_miss on the node where allocation succeeded.
+
+Usually preferred node is the one local to the CPU where the process executes,
+but restrictions such as mempolicies can change that, so there are also two
+counters based on CPU local node. local_node is similar to numa_hit and is
+incremented on allocation from a node by CPU on the same node. other_node is
+similar to numa_miss and is incremented on the node where allocation succeeds
+from a CPU from a different node. Note there is no counter analogical to
+numa_foreign.
+
+In more detail:
+
 =============== ============================================================
 numa_hit	A process wanted to allocate memory from this node,
 		and succeeded.
@@ -14,11 +29,13 @@ numa_miss	A process wanted to allocate memory from another node,
 		but ended up with memory from this node.
 
 numa_foreign	A process wanted to allocate on this node,
-		but ended up with memory from another one.
+		but ended up with memory from another node.
 
-local_node	A process ran on this node and got memory from it.
+local_node	A process ran on this node's CPU,
+		and got memory from this node.
 
-other_node	A process ran on this node and got memory from another node.
+other_node	A process ran on a different node's CPU
+		and got memory from this node.
 
 interleave_hit 	Interleaving wanted to allocate from this node
 		and succeeded.
@@ -28,3 +45,11 @@ For easier reading you can use the numastat utility from the numactl package
 (http://oss.sgi.com/projects/libnuma/). Note that it only works
 well right now on machines with a small number of CPUs.
 
+Note that on systems with memoryless nodes (where a node has CPUs but no
+memory) the numa_hit, numa_miss and numa_foreign statistics can be skewed
+heavily. In the current kernel implementation, if a process prefers a
+memoryless node (i.e.  because it is running on one of its local CPU), the
+implementation actually treats one of the nearest nodes with memory as the
+preferred node. As a result, such allocation will not increase the numa_foreign
+counter on the memoryless node, and will skew the numa_hit, numa_miss and
+numa_foreign statistics of the nearest node.