I believe this is the same bug as identified in #399614 (autofs: dont_create_remote_dirs patch relies on /etc/mtab). I built an autofs package excluding the 077_dont_create_remote_dirs patch, and it was able to create its mountpoints again.
That also explains why strace did not show any call to mkdir(): it had already (wrongly) determined that / was a remote FS, and so did not even try creating the directories. Since the patch's do_mkdir() does not set errno in this case, it is perhaps just as well that the syslog message does not include the error, as it could have been quite misleading! (Normally, of course, it would be a useful addition.) -- Tim Bagot, BlueArc Engineering
