Transmit requests in Xen's virtual network protocol can consist of multiple parts. While not really useful, except for the initial part any of them may be of zero length, i.e. carry no data at all. Besides a certain initial portion of the to be transferred data, these parts are directly translated into what Linux calls SKB fragments. Such converted request parts can, when for a particular SKB they are all of length zero, lead to a de-reference of NULL in core networking code.