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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/

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:49PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:49PM (#301433) Journal

    There's nothing wrong with Linux providing the EFI file system. What is wrong is mounting it R/W unconditionally. Note that this would be wrong even if you could not brick your laptop that way.

    What would be the problem if the one option of systemd that needs it simply had the documentation "this option only works if the EFI file system is mounted read/write"?

    Then anyone who needs it could manually put an R/W mount entry in fstab, and everyone else could decide not to do it.

    A typical Linux system gets more or less unusable if /usr is not mounted. Yet there's nothing forcing you to mount /usr if you don't want to. Not mounting the EFI file system leaves the system usable, with the exception of one single feature, so why force it on everyone?

    --
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @09:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @09:37PM (#301688)

    Because this is the cheap quick easy way to do this

    Welcome to Systemd. Enjoy the ride.