Running commands on Hive on Tez failed with NPE

[Ge Silas]

Hi Tez community,

I recently encountered with a problem while running command in Hive on Tez. The 
command failed with below stack trace

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException: 
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.session.SessionState.start(SessionState.java:617)
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.session.SessionState.beginStart(SessionState.java:531)
        at org.apache.hadoop.hive.cli.CliDriver.run(CliDriver.java:720)
        at org.apache.hadoop.hive.cli.CliDriver.run(CliDriver.java:652)
        at org.apache.hadoop.hive.cli.CliDriver.main(CliDriver.java:647)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
        at 
sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
        at 
sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:498)
        at org.apache.hadoop.util.RunJar.run(RunJar.java:221)
        at org.apache.hadoop.util.RunJar.main(RunJar.java:136)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.tez.TezSessionState.createTezDir(TezSessionState.java:596)
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.tez.TezSessionState.openInternal(TezSessionState.java:245)
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.tez.TezSessionState.beginOpen(TezSessionState.java:220)
        at 
org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.session.SessionState.start(SessionState.java:614)
        ... 10 more

The hive.log does not show that the command has reached Hive yet. Anyone has 
seen such errors before?

Hive 2.1.1 with Tez 0.8.4.

Thanks,
Silas