This fixes errors with utilities (such as LVM's vgscan) that try to scan all devices. Previously this would generate read errors when uninitialized nbd devices were scanned: # vgscan Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while... /dev/nbd0: read failed after 0 of 1024 at 0: Input/output error /dev/nbd0: read failed after 0 of 1024 at 509804544: Input/output error /dev/nbd0: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 0: Input/output error /dev/nbd1: read failed after 0 of 1024 at 509804544: Input/output error /dev/nbd1: read failed after 0 of 2048 at 0: Input/output error From now on, uninitialized nbd devices will have size zero, which prevents these errors. Patch applies and was tested against 2.6.23-rc2-mm2. Thanks, Paul