Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] promisor-remote: prevent lazy-fetch recursion in child fetch

From: Paul Tarjan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:18:46 -0600

Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> writes:

> Is this a theoretical concern or a practical one? I would expect that
> backfill fetches never cause the server side to send a pack with
> REF_DELTA objects to nonexistent objects. And if they did they are
> broken.

Practical. We hit this at Anthropic: 276 GB of promisor packs written
by `git maintenance --task=prefetch` in 90 minutes against a ~10 GB
monorepo with ~61K stale prefetch refs pointing at GC'd commits.

> Exactly, this here matches my understanding. The backfill fetches don't
> perform negotiation, so we shouldn't ever see a thin pack in the first
> place. What I don't yet understand is your comment about the depth-2
> fetch -- when would we ever do that?

The code path already exists and is tested: t5616 line 832 ("tolerate
server sending REF_DELTA against missing promisor objects") creates
exactly this scenario. index-pack's fix_unresolved_deltas() calls
promisor_remote_get_direct() when it encounters a REF_DELTA against a
missing base (builtin/index-pack.c:1508). That's the depth-2 fetch.

With noop negotiation a well-behaved server shouldn't send REF_DELTA
against objects the client doesn't have. But partial clones with
blob:none mean the client is missing most blobs, and if the server
sends a thin pack deltified against one of those filtered-out blobs,
index-pack will try to fetch the base.

> I dunno, I think it's quite different overall. In the mentioned commit
> we protect against a stale commit-graph, which is something that is
> quite plausible to happen on the client side. But here we protect us
> against a remote side that sends a packfile that violates specs, as far
> as I understand.

Fair point. The commit-graph case is purely client-side corruption,
while this requires a misbehaving server. The bug shape is the same
(unbounded recursion through fetch_objects()) but the trigger is
different. I'll drop the comparison in the next version.

> Hm. Can we craft a test that shows us the resulting failure in practice?
> Testing for the environment variable feels like a bad proxy to me, as
> I'd rather want to learn how Git would fail now.

Good point. Reworked the test in v3. It now injects a thin pack
containing a REF_DELTA against a missing base via HTTP (using the
replace_packfile pattern from t5616). This triggers the actual
recursion path: index-pack encounters the missing base, calls
promisor_remote_get_direct(), which hits the GIT_NO_LAZY_FETCH=1
guard and fails with "lazy fetching disabled". Without the fix,
the depth-2 fetch would proceed and potentially recurse.

> Okay, so this seems to be an issue that can be hit in the wild. But I
> have to wonder whether this really is a bug on the client-side, or
> whether this is a bug that actually sits on your server. So ultimately:
> why does the server send REF_DELTA objects in the first place? Is it
> using git-upload-pack(1), or is it using a different implementation of
> Git to serve data?

The server is GitHub. I did a blob:none partial clone and after some
further git operations ended up in this state. I don't have
server-side data on why it sent REF_DELTAs against missing bases.

> Note that I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have protection on the
> client, too. But I'd first like to understand whether there is a bug
> lurking somewhere that causes us to send invalid packfiles.

Agreed, there may well be a server-side bug here. Regardless, the
client should fail fast rather than consume unbounded resources.