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/20211209095453.GM3366@techsingularity.net


Fixes: 1b4e3f26 ("mm: vmscan: Reduce throttling due to a failure to make progress")
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Reported-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>