[PATCH v2 3/4] mm: thp: restore SHRINKER_NONSLAB on the deferred split shrinker

From: Qinyun Tan

Date: Mon Sep 07 2026 - 07:13:19 EST


On a system booted with cgroup.memory=nokmem, the deferred split
shrinker is quietly demoted to a non-memcg-aware one. As a result,
partially unmapped THPs are only split under global reclaim; memcg
(limit-induced) reclaim never splits them, so a cgroup under memory
pressure keeps its underused THPs intact.

This is a regression from commit fafaeceb89a5 ("mm: switch deferred
split shrinker to list_lru"), which re-registered the shrinker without
SHRINKER_NONSLAB. The shrinker had carried this flag since commit
0a432dcbeb32 ("mm: shrinker: make shrinker not depend on memcg kmem")
precisely so it would keep working with kmem accounting disabled.
Without the flag, shrinker_memcg_alloc() fails with -ENOSYS under
nokmem and the shrinker loses its memcg awareness.

This was noticed by Michal during review of the patch "mm/list_lru:
don't copy stale shrinker id from non-memcg-aware shrinkers" [1].

Restore the flag.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/697713c4-0857-485b-aba7-c74f37a3c8b4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/

Fixes: fafaeceb89a5 ("mm: switch deferred split shrinker to list_lru")
Suggested-by: Michal Koutný <mkoutny@xxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Qinyun Tan <qinyuntan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Zi Yan <ziy@xxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: David Hildenbrand (Arm) <david@xxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Usama Arif <usama.arif@xxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/huge_memory.c | 3 ++-
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/mm/huge_memory.c b/mm/huge_memory.c
index c5d11147b69ae..87c9fc48b7cfd 100644
--- a/mm/huge_memory.c
+++ b/mm/huge_memory.c
@@ -1064,7 +1064,8 @@ int folio_memcg_alloc_deferred(struct folio *folio)
static int __init thp_shrinker_init(void)
{
deferred_split_shrinker = shrinker_alloc(SHRINKER_NUMA_AWARE |
- SHRINKER_MEMCG_AWARE,
+ SHRINKER_MEMCG_AWARE |
+ SHRINKER_NONSLAB,
"thp-deferred_split");
if (!deferred_split_shrinker)
return -ENOMEM;
--
2.43.7