A method, system, and computer program product for fast cancellation of an I/O request in a data processing system are provided in the illustrative embodiments. A first component in a stack comprising a plurality of components determines whether a memory buffer associated with the I/O request is valid, the memory buffer being an addressable area in a memory in the data processing system. The first component, responsive to the memory buffer being valid, creates a first request data structure corresponding to the I/O request, wherein the first request data structure includes a reference to the memory buffer. The first component passes the first request data structure to a second component in the stack.