Running "rm -rf /" Is Now Bricking Linux Systems (phoronix.com)

Posted by timothy on Monday February 1, 2016 @01:56AM from the now-you-can-troll-harder dept.

An anonymous reader writes: For newer systems utilizing UEFI, running rm -rf / is enough to permanently brick your system. While it's a trivial command to run on Linux systems, Windows and other operating systems are also prone to this issue when using UEFI. The problem comes down to UEFI variables being mounted with read/write permissions and when recursively deleting everything, the UEFI variables get wiped too. Systemd developers have rejected mounting the EFI variables as read-only, since there are valid use-cases for writing to them. Mounting them read-only can also break other applications, so for now there is no good solution to avoid potentially bricking your system, but kernel developers are investigating the issue.

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Cough... systemd... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-02-01 02:02 · Score: 0, Troll

In other news, Poettering remains the best advocate Apple has for switching geeks to their platform... they should pay him, really.
Gonna get lambasted for this but... by Narcocide · 2016-02-01 02:04 · Score: 0, Troll

Isn't "not running systemd" a good solution?
Re:Okay, what about a "more special" directory? by phantomfive · 2016-02-01 06:12 · Score: 0, Troll

But don't worry, systemd team plans to completely replace everything in /etc so it can be empty and clean.

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