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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:50PM (#301541)

    On the topic of GregKH, one reason he is so defensive about udev is that he wrote it back in the day.

    Yes, Sievers currently had maintainership when it was folded into systemd. But i suspect it had the tacit approval of GregKH.

    Rob Landley has an interesting story about an exchange between him, Sievers and GregKH about documenting the /sys interface udev depends on.

    http://www.landley.net/notes-2015.html#05-07-2015 [landley.net]