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

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.

4 of 699 comments (clear)

  1. Cough... systemd... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    In other news, Poettering remains the best advocate Apple has for switching geeks to their platform... they should pay him, really.

  2. Gonna get lambasted for this but... by Narcocide · · Score: 0, Troll

    Isn't "not running systemd" a good solution?

  3. Re:Linux is a fragile house of cards by LichtSpektren · · Score: -1, Troll

    And its by ignorant design mostly

    for example last night I removed the soduku game that came with my distro, thanks to its dependency tree and debian / ubuntu's package management removing this one stupid game took half of XFCE with it, and I was left with a command prompt

    say what you want about windows, it doesnt fuck the entire system if I uninstall solitaire

    You're a fucking idiot. Whenever you install or remove something with apt, it tells you exactly what's going to be removed with it. So you chose to blindly ignore the warning prompts and wiped out your DE in spite of it. The exact same thing happens if you randomly delete folders in your Win32 folder as well.

    You could've avoided it by carefully using apt flags, but again, you're a fucking idiot.

  4. Re:Okay, what about a "more special" directory? by phantomfive · · Score: 0, Troll

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

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."