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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, @11:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @11:04AM (#301332)

    nothing the OS does should be able to brick a computer. Can you guess what SystemD just did?

    It has always been the choice of the OS whether or not to allow dangerous things which can easily brick a computer. SystemD just made the choice to do so.

    I remember dicking around back when Linux was first coming out. Back when you had to write it to a boot sector yourself. When there was no installer. Back then I was experimenting with my own OS (not just a kernel), but at that stage I was working on my compiler and FS and decided to booted GNU/Linux to use GCC to bootstrap my own assembler.

    For fun on that GNU/Linux system I decided I'd recreate a music playing program I had used on DOS. One fun thing to do is mess with the CMOS timer to modulate the PC speaker and make it play music. Older machines had a nice big PC speaker, and it could produce far better quality audio than today's little piezoelectric beepers. Back in the old DOS / BBS days computer nerds would exchange .MOD files the way normals did mix-tapes.

    Linux forced me to run such x86 assembler programs as root. I made a mistake in my code and learned that bad things can happen even using the bog hardware interfaces. On many motherboards it was trivial to corrupt your CMOS and brick the machine. One could brick the hardware on MSDOS with just a few opcodes. Back then Linux made an effort to prevent non-kernel code from bricking the machine. Sadly, now it seems those days of sanity are long gone. The entropy has cropped up in its maintainer pool, and thus it's increasingly senile brain is giving way to dementia.

    All things end. It's bitter sweet watching Linux die. C'est la vie! [osdev.org]