An unaligned zero write causes NULL deferencing in bdrv_co_do_pwritev. That path is reachable from bdrv_co_write_zeroes and bdrv_aio_write_zeroes.
You can easily trigger through the former with qemu-io, as the test case added by 61815d6e0aa. For bdrv_aio_write_zeroes, in common cases there's always a format driver (which uses 512 alignment), so it would be much rarer to have unaligned requests (only concerning top level here, when the request goes down to bs->file, where for example the alignment is 4k, it would then be calling bdrv_co_write_zeroes because it's in a coroutine). fc3959e4669a1c fixed bdrv_co_write_zeroes but not bdrv_aio_write_zeroes. The lattern is the actually used one by device model. Revert the previous fix, do it in bdrv_co_do_pwritev, to cover both paths. v2: Split to three aligned pwritev. Fam Zheng (2): Revert "block: Fix unaligned zero write" block: Fix NULL deference for unaligned write if qiov is NULL block.c | 121 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----------------------------- 1 file changed, 66 insertions(+), 55 deletions(-) -- 1.9.3