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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) by gnampff on Tuesday February 09 2016, @11:19AM

    by gnampff (5658) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @11:19AM (#301338)

    As much as I find some of the systemd stuff weird, irritating or stupid this really is a bug on a different layer.
    My sysfs is mounted rw too. Yet even with sudo i cannot just go and delete the power settings folder of my cpu.

    I fail to see how this is different. Why would this be the fault of the one that mounts it?
    To me this sounds just like blaming xorg or konsole for not stopping me from stupid stuff i order my kernel to do.