Any idea when this will make it into an official release? I was actually making a comment yesterday evening when I saw these updates. We're having a similar problem:

Basically, when we start a job on any given node, there's a high chance that the next job queued to run on the same node will attempt to start and then fail with this exception:

FATAL: null
java.lang.NullPointerException
at hudson.model.Slave.createLauncher(Slave.java:348)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.createLauncher(AbstractBuild.java:564)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.run(AbstractBuild.java:481)
at hudson.model.Run.execute(Run.java:1688)
at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:43)
at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:88)
at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:231)

I say "high chance" because this exception is fairly reproducible in our systems with some variation. Most often, this occurs in builds triggered used in the Parameterized Build Plugin.

Does anyone have an idea if our issues might be solved by this fix as well?

Also observed from Support Core:

WARNING: Could not get content from 'File descriptors (Unix only)' for support bundle 
java.lang.NullPointerException 
	at hudson.model.Slave.createLauncher(Slave.java:347) 
	at com.cloudbees.jenkins.support.impl.FileDescriptorLimit.addContents(FileDescriptorLimit.java:65) 
	at com.cloudbees.jenkins.support.impl.FileDescriptorLimit.addContents(FileDescriptorLimit.java:56) 
	at com.cloudbees.jenkins.support.SupportPlugin.writeBundle(SupportPlugin.java:264) 
	at com.cloudbees.jenkins.support.SupportPlugin.writeBundle(SupportPlugin.java:227) 
	at com.cloudbees.jenkins.support.SupportPlugin$PeriodicWorkImpl$1.run(SupportPlugin.java:543) 
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:780)

Code changed in jenkins
User: Jesse Glick
Path:
src/main/java/com/cloudbees/jenkins/support/impl/FileDescriptorLimit.java
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/support-core-plugin/44539f3a597ed5c37436be28d1087de0aacdd3be
Log:
JENKINS-21999 Workaround: ignore an offline slave.

Code changed in jenkins
User: christ66
Path:
core/src/main/java/hudson/Launcher.java
core/src/main/java/hudson/model/Slave.java
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/jenkins/7946d9fa3e00295298294137a3b263d2c6def9ff
Log:
[FIXED JENKINS-21999] If a slave node does not exist it will throw a
null pointer exception. Instead we create a dummy launcher and return
that if it is unable to get the slave node.

(cherry picked from commit d2a2ec589f4728fa2cfa35371155bce7cc95a0a7)