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In A UEFI World, "rm -rf /" Can Brick Your System

posted onFebruary 2, 2016
by l33tdawg

Running rm -rf / on any UEFI Linux distribution can potentially perma-brick your system.

As a public service announcement, recursively removing all of your files from / is no longer recommended. On UEFI distributions by default where EFI variables are accessible via /sys, this can now mean trashing your UEFI implementation.

There is this systemd bug report requesting that UEFI variables be mounted as read-only by default. Lennart Poettering had initially responded and simply said, "Well, there are tools that actually want to write it. We also expose /dev/sda accessible for root, even though it can be used to hose your system. The ability to hose a system is certainly reason enought to make sure it's well protected and only writable to root. But beyond that: root can do anything really." He then closed the ticket.

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