SoylentNews

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

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:27AM   
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

• Re:Obvious compromise: (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:37AM

  by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:37AM (#301260) Journal

  I would argue that this is a logical bug.

  The technical term is "design error".

  Yes, this is an edge case, and no one in their right minds would willfully issue rm -rf /

  Well, anything that happens to delete files and include the EFI file system will do the same. Think of some erroneous find that happens to unexpectedly match something in the EFI file system. Or you run some script to detect and delete duplicate files, and by error you have it include the EFI file system and it happens to find a "duplicate" there.

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

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		2