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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the why-oh-why dept.

A number of users have reported that running "rm --no-preserve-root -rf /" not only deletes all their files (as expected), but also permanently bricks their computers (which is not). Tracing the issue revealed that the ultimate cause was that SystemD mounted the EFI pseudo-fs as read-write even when this FS was not listed in fstab, and deleting certain files in this pseudo-fs causes certain buggy, but very common, firmware not to POST anymore. A user reported this bug on SystemD's GitHub issue tracker, asking that the FS be mounted read-only instead of read-write, and said bug was immediately closed as invalid. The comment thread for the bug was locked shortly after. Discuss.

Links:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/02/01/running-a-single-delete-command-can-permanently-brick-laptops-from-inside-linux/


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:44AM (#301183)

    Negative sir, forking a distro is non-trivial work and bitching about formerly beloved existing distros is the only way to provide feedback.

    Also, nowhere does any Linux distro I'm aware of ever use those words you speak. Ever.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 10 2016, @04:30PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday February 10 2016, @04:30PM (#302231) Journal

    I'm sure he meant "NO WARRANTY" instead of "NO LICENSE". Of course, if you follow that advice, you cannot use any software at all, as I'm not aware of a single software product, whether libre or proprietary, whether gratis or commercial, that doesn't have such a warranty disclaimer.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.