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SystemD Mounts EFI pseudo-fs RW, Facilitates Permanently Bricking Laptops, Closes Bug Invalid

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

linuxrocks123 writes:

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/

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:19AM (#301216)

    And are we better for want of any of it?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:29AM (#301222)

    Lets go down the list:

    GTK, Was Pottering involved?
    Xorg, Was Pottering involved?
    Wayland, Was Pottering involved?
    SELinux, Arguably is this a good thing, still, was Pottering involved?
    1 out of every 6 lines of code in the Linux kernel, Was Pottering involved?
    cairo, Was Pottering involved?
    PulseAudio, hahahhahahahahha
    NetworkManager, see above. I have a room of servers that still has this bullshit removed.
    Plymouth graphical boot screens, Was Pottering involved?
    the Liberation Fonts, Was Pottering involved?
    the Bitstream Vera fonts, Was Pottering involved?
    ext3, Was Pottering involved?
    ext4, Was Pottering involved?
    grub, Was Pottering involved?
    glibc, Was Pottering involved?
    Gnome, Was Pottering involved? I genuinely don't know on this one. I could see it given what an unusable clusterfuck Gnome3 is now.
    metacity, Was Pottering involved?
    gdb. Was Pottering involved?

    I'm not sure what case you're trying to make. Most of us dislike Pottering specifically, and that casts doubt on everything else. You're not reducing the doubt. Only increasing the breadth.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by cafebabe on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:31PM

      by cafebabe (894) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:31PM (#301621) Journal

      On the reboot after typing chmod 000 /usr/bin/pulseaudio, I gained 16MB of RAM and 3% of processing power. I also lost one redundant place where the volume could be set to zero. And I have yet to find an application which is adversely affected.

      --
      1702845791×2