dig +nssearch crashes for the root zone
dig +nssearch .
command crashes, as discovered and reported by Thomas Amgarten in this comment.
This is a lookup reference counting bug, happening when dig
sees a bad cookie in one of the queries running in parallel, and re-queues the lookup.
This isn't strictly related to the root zone, but the root zone has quite a few name servers, which increases the chances of encountering a ;; BADCOOKIE, retrying.
situation.
I'm preparing an MR with a fix and a more detailed description of the bug.