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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: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:05PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 09 2016, @01:05PM (#301390)

    If YOU then tell

    Or a bug.

    In this bifurcated era where smart people use pkgng and nix and whatever else and the lowliest of the noobs think "wget http:root_me_root_me_harder.sh | /bin/bash" is also a package manager, there was an example I don't remember and for some reason can't google where some commercial software shell script accidentally pulled a "rm -Rf /"

    Starting Score:    1  point
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    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @11:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @11:25PM (#301764)
    That was Steam. When uninstalling, it would "rm -rf steamdir" -- which is fine as long as steamdir actually points to your Steam directory.
  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday February 10 2016, @03:11PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday February 10 2016, @03:11PM (#302163)

    Indeed. I didn't mean to imply that you had to do it intentionally or directly, only that the user had to independently initiate the action, and that there was nothing systemD-specific about the problem.