The code comes from Intel's Clear Containers and hyper. The interesting bit is that the tech is now part of the openstack foundation, under the name Kata Containers. At Kubecon yesterday, they did a demo, showing a fork bomb taking out a container, but not the host. It actually seems nearly ready to use.
Yes, there are several ways to combat fork bombs (ulimits or pid namespaces). This was purely for the sake of the live demo that required a kernel crash example, there are certainly other ways to combat it.
