elenst reported this in MDEV-13900:

mysqld: /home/elenst/git/bb-10.3-marko-instant-column/storage/innobase/handler/handler0alter.cc:8295: bool commit_try_rebuild(Alter_inplace_info*, ha_innobase_inplace_ctx*, TABLE*, const TABLE*, trx_t*, const char*): Assertion `user_table->get_ref_count() == 1' failed.

From the stack traces of all threads, I concluded that the culprit must be a race condition between a table-rebuilding ALTER TABLE (or OPTIMIZE TABLE) and INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_SYS_TABLESTATS.

This was broken in MySQL 5.7.10 and merged to MariaDB 10.2.2.

The bug is that i_s_sys_tables_fill_table_stats() is incrementing the reference count of a table while not holding something that conflicts with a concurrent DDL operation (either shared dict_operation_lock or something that conflicts with MDL_EXCLUSIVE).

In MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 10.0/10.1, there is a different race condition: the table can be dropped while the function is accessing it.

I believe that the correct fix would be to acquire shared dict_operation_lock before looking up the table, and releasing it after the table is no longer being used. There is no need to increment or decrement the reference count.