alter table loops internally and fills up disk

In a fresh MariaDB when I import a small 9MB InnoDB Table and enter OPTIMIZE LOCAL TABLE the server hangs/loops and fills the disk 100% with one huge #sql...ibd file. The mysqld has then to be stopped with kill -9...
As written in the documentation the server performs an ALTER TABLE engine=InnoDB, so there is the same effect when I enter the ALTER directly, also on ALTER TABLE ADD KEY and so on. No difference if there are already keys on the table or not. If the table contains less than ~10000 rows, it works fine.
Workarounds:
1) change the engine to MyIsam and then back to InnoDB
2) set old_alter_table=ON (preferred)