mm: vmscan: reduce throttling due to a failure to make progress -fix

Hugh Dickins reported the following

	My tmpfs swapping load (tweaked to use huge pages more heavily
	than in real life) is far from being a realistic load: but it was
	notably slowed down by your throttling mods in 5.16-rc, and this
	patch makes it well again - thanks.

	But: it very quickly hit NULL pointer until I changed that last
	line to

        if (first_pgdat)
                consider_reclaim_throttle(first_pgdat, sc);

The likely issue is that huge pages are a major component of the test
workload.  When this is the case, first_pgdat may never get set if
compaction is ready to continue due to this check

        if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_COMPACTION) &&
            sc->order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER &&
            compaction_ready(zone, sc)) {
                sc->compaction_ready = true;
                continue;
        }

If this was true for every zone in the zonelist, first_pgdat would never
get set resulting in a NULL pointer exception.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Fixes: 1b4e3f26f9f75 ("mm: vmscan: Reduce throttling due to a failure to make progress")
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Reported-by: Hugh Dickins <[email protected]>
Cc: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <[email protected]>
Cc: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <[email protected]>
Cc: Darrick J. Wong <[email protected]>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>

diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 4c4d5f6cd8a3db7bac95858633ff2980ab2fb23d..700434db57352f7044ab08a3ddbd89c40cb9e17c 100644 (file)
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -3530,7 +3530,8 @@ static void shrink_zones(struct zonelist *zonelist, struct scan_control *sc)
                shrink_node(zone->zone_pgdat, sc);
        }
 
-       consider_reclaim_throttle(first_pgdat, sc);
+       if (first_pgdat)
+               consider_reclaim_throttle(first_pgdat, sc);
 
        /*
         * Restore to original mask to avoid the impact on the caller if we