Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 15 submissions in the queue.

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
SystemD Mounts EFI pseudo-fs RW, Facilitates Permanently Bricking Laptops, Closes Bug Invalid | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 145 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:24PM (#301573)

    I've used Windows for longer than that and those problems kinda went out some time into Windows XP. And Windows 2000 was not that bad either (other than the slow boot time on old hardware of that time and some resource limits which supposedly could be worked-around: http://weblogs.asp.net/mikedopp/increasing-user-handle-and-gdi-handle-limits [asp.net] ). Windows 8.x and 10 on the other hand are abominations. And Vista never happened ;).

    I did use Linux for desktop purposes too at work for a few years starting from about 2005, and it was an inferior experience for much basic desktop stuff (clipboard management, sound handling, the general way the GUI should work) and only better in other more esoteric ways (e.g. kio slaves). I used KDE because it was less of a joke than GNOME (if you don't think so go look up what Linus said about GNOME around that time). Sad to say the desktop stuff today is still crap (I've reported bugs years ago that were closed with WONTFIX). The server stuff is still OK but I haven't moved to the SystemD crap yet.

    You bunch can keep saying desktop Linux is fine but, if things were really that great why have there been so many major forks along with lots of people saying others are screwing stuff up? Are they all wrong and stuff is great? It's almost as if Microsoft is paying Linux developers to screw stuff up every time Microsoft releases crap.