Because the bug kills pid1 which took down production boxes:
> I should point out that this is not theoretical. I went through all of the above because some real machines hit this for some reason. I don't have access to them, so I had to work backwards from just the message logged by init.
> […]
> Let me say this again: this happens in the wild. The "touch * * *..." repro looks contrived, because, well, that's the whole point of a repro.
Without, all the time, bothering to read the article, and asking here something that no-one here could know, because it's not in the article. If you really wanted to know, you could have mailed the author.
I'm a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but isn't this kind of thing (bulk-rewriting stuff in /etc) exactly what configuration management systems do in their normal operation?
I don't have a chef/puppet/etc system handy at the moment, but could this possibly be the result of someone setting a file immutable, with the chef recipe dealing with that bit of the filesystem changing, causing chef to repeatedly trying to apply a changeset?