diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 211769c471..e56eb78efd 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -85,6 +85,7 @@
 3.11.1
  * Properly evict pstmts from prepared statements cache (CASSANDRA-13641)
 Merged from 3.0:
+  * Allow different NUMACTL_ARGS to be passed in (CASSANDRA-13557)
   * Fix secondary index queries on COMPACT tables (CASSANDRA-13627) 
   * Nodetool listsnapshots output is missing a newline, if there are no snapshots (CASSANDRA-13568)
 
diff --git a/bin/cassandra b/bin/cassandra
index 57ea1900dd..6a6644e2cd 100755
--- a/bin/cassandra
+++ b/bin/cassandra
@@ -107,7 +107,7 @@ fi
 # avoid disk I/O. Even for the purpose of CPU efficiency, we don't
 # really have CPU<->data affinity anyway. Also, empirically test that numactl
 # works before trying to use it (CASSANDRA-3245).
-NUMACTL_ARGS="--interleave=all"
+NUMACTL_ARGS=${NUMACTL_ARGS:-"--interleave=all"}
 if which numactl >/dev/null 2>/dev/null && numactl $NUMACTL_ARGS ls / >/dev/null 2>/dev/null
 then
     NUMACTL="numactl $NUMACTL_ARGS"