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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: 2) by jimshatt on Tuesday February 09 2016, @08:49AM

    by jimshatt (978) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @08:49AM (#301286) Journal
    And even then, you'll only brick the BIOS when the implementation is crappy anyway. I'm not sure mounting rw is a good idea, but it's not a bug per se.
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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday February 10 2016, @04:39AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 10 2016, @04:39AM (#301921) Journal

    I think that leaving it mounted rw when you don't need it so counts as a bug. But certainly refusing to fix the problem when it starts bricking systems counts as a bug. And an extremely bad one, though the severity of the bug is not so much in the bug itself as in the administrative process holding it in place.

    Prior to this event I had thought that the problems being reported about systemd were all "teething problems" and that they would go away as the software matured. Now It looks more like they are being intentionally frozen in place, though one may speculate about the reasons for why this is being done.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.