d in this bug report: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12277 Testing would need to be performed to determine if the two issues are the same. This problem was introduced by the new request handling thread code ("NBD: allow nbd to be used locally", 3/2008), which entered into mainline around 2.6.25. The fix, which is fairly simple, is to restore the check for lo->sock being NULL in do_nbd_request. This causes I/O to an uninitialized nbd to immediately fail with an I/O error, as it did prior to the introduction of this bug. Signed-off-by: Paul Clements Reported-by: Jon Nelson Acked-by: Pavel Machek Cc: [2.6.26.x, 2.6.27.x, 2.6.28.x] Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds