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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/

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2016, @02:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2016, @02:55AM (#306694)

    You should have seen him defending breaking su because Pulseaudio somehow didn't work alongside it otherwise.

    This by using systemd's pam module to alter a xdg environment variable if your ran su or su -l, so that anything that dependend on that variable to tell them where to stash their settings file would stop the initial users settings file.

    His defense was that su was a broken concept.

    Then later someone offered him a fix to pulseaudio so that the variable change was no longer needed. But this happened outside the bug report discussion, and the people following it had to rely on third parties to keep an eye on the various mailing lists. Eventually i think the bug report died because it was tired to a Fedora version that was no longer supported.

    Then they introduce functionality to systemd that mimics su using Linux namespaces/containers.

    Seriously, the whole systemd thing is a mishmash of OSX-isms, Solaris idolation, and an attempt to bypass Torvalds on kernel details by countermanding them via the init process (disabling sysreq combos, changing mount defaults, and the list keeps growing).