diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 6866f672f3..f090b2b8fd 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -408,3 +408,8 @@ Add "NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=none" to none-gpu tasks
 - Fix initialization error when using tensor parallelism on vLLM above 0.18
 - Fix multiple device typos
 
+## v2.9.1 - 2026-08-05
+
+**Bug fixes**
+- Fix panic on asymmetric NVML GPU Link topologies by logging a warning and returning a fallback score of 0
+
diff --git a/pkg/device/nvidia/calculate_score.go b/pkg/device/nvidia/calculate_score.go
index 54a874e196..3ee3fbe00b 100644
--- a/pkg/device/nvidia/calculate_score.go
+++ b/pkg/device/nvidia/calculate_score.go
@@ -22,6 +22,7 @@ import (
 
 	"github.com/NVIDIA/go-nvlib/pkg/nvlib/device"
 	"github.com/NVIDIA/go-nvml/pkg/nvml"
+	"k8s.io/klog/v2"
 )
 
 // Device represents a GPU device as reported by NVML, including all of its
@@ -211,8 +212,9 @@ func calculateGPUPairScore(gpu0 *Device, gpu1 *Device) int {
 	}
 
 	if len(gpu0.Links[gpu1.Index]) != len(gpu1.Links[gpu0.Index]) {
-		err := fmt.Errorf("internal error in bestEffort GPU allocator: all P2PLinks between 2 GPUs should be bidirectional")
-		panic(err)
+		klog.Warningf("internal error in bestEffort GPU allocator: all P2PLinks between 2 GPUs should be bidirectional, but got %d vs %d between GPU %s and GPU %s",
+			len(gpu0.Links[gpu1.Index]), len(gpu1.Links[gpu0.Index]), gpu0.UUID, gpu1.UUID)
+		return 0
 	}
 
 	score := 0
diff --git a/pkg/device/nvidia/calculate_score_test.go b/pkg/device/nvidia/calculate_score_test.go
index 115b6f4d1e..320ac6f7a0 100644
--- a/pkg/device/nvidia/calculate_score_test.go
+++ b/pkg/device/nvidia/calculate_score_test.go
@@ -108,6 +108,37 @@ func Test_calculateGPUScore(t *testing.T) {
 				},
 			},
 		},
+		{
+			name: "asymmetric links test",
+			args: []*Device{
+				{
+					Index: 0,
+					nvlibDevice: nvlibDevice{
+						UUID: "gpu0",
+					},
+					Links: map[int][]P2PLink{
+						1: {{Type: SingleNVLINKLink}},
+					},
+				},
+				{
+					Index: 1,
+					nvlibDevice: nvlibDevice{
+						UUID: "gpu1",
+					},
+					Links: map[int][]P2PLink{},
+				},
+			},
+			want: ListDeviceScore{
+				{
+					UUID:  "gpu0",
+					Score: map[string]int{"gpu1": 0},
+				},
+				{
+					UUID:  "gpu1",
+					Score: map[string]int{"gpu0": 0},
+				},
+			},
+		},
 	}
 	for _, test := range tests {
 		t.Run(test.name, func(t *testing.T) {