[PATCH] netfs: Fix read abandonment during retry

From: David Howells

Date: Wed Mar 18 2026 - 11:39:24 EST


Under certain circumstances, all the remaining subrequests from a read
request will get abandoned during retry. The abandonment process expects
the 'subreq' variable to be set to the place to start abandonment from, but
it doesn't always have a useful value (it will be uninitialised on the
first pass through the loop and it may point to a deleted subrequest on
later passes).

Fix the first jump to "abandon:" to set subreq to the start of the first
subrequest expected to need retry (which, in this abandonment case, turned
out unexpectedly to no longer have NEED_RETRY set).

Also clear the subreq pointer after discarding superfluous retryable
subrequests to cause an oops if we do try to access it.

Fixes: ee4cdf7ba857 ("netfs: Speed up buffered reading")
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx>
cc: Paulo Alcantara <pc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
cc: netfs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc: linux-fsdevel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
---
fs/netfs/read_retry.c | 5 ++++-
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/fs/netfs/read_retry.c b/fs/netfs/read_retry.c
index 71a0c7ed163a..68fc869513ef 100644
--- a/fs/netfs/read_retry.c
+++ b/fs/netfs/read_retry.c
@@ -93,8 +93,10 @@ static void netfs_retry_read_subrequests(struct netfs_io_request *rreq)
from->start, from->transferred, from->len);

if (test_bit(NETFS_SREQ_FAILED, &from->flags) ||
- !test_bit(NETFS_SREQ_NEED_RETRY, &from->flags))
+ !test_bit(NETFS_SREQ_NEED_RETRY, &from->flags)) {
+ subreq = from;
goto abandon;
+ }

list_for_each_continue(next, &stream->subrequests) {
subreq = list_entry(next, struct netfs_io_subrequest, rreq_link);
@@ -178,6 +180,7 @@ static void netfs_retry_read_subrequests(struct netfs_io_request *rreq)
if (subreq == to)
break;
}
+ subreq = NULL;
continue;
}