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A comment on Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models. Parent comment

Re:Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models by nikbackm on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @11:46AM (#15971180)
Well, you could at one time brick your computer by by executing an ill-advised "rm -rf" from Linux.

Made the news some years back I think.

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Re:Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models by jacquesm on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @02:00PM (#15972616)
You're referring to this?

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UEFI-rm-...

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Re:Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models by HankB99 on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @06:06PM (#15974709)
I guess this explains why I was not able to boot by USB the other day. I tried out Ubuntu 17.10 on my Y50-70 recently. :(
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Re:Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models by gerdesj on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @11:55AM (#15971284)
You can do a similar thing in any OS - delete the vast majority of your file system by running a command as root/administrator and ignoring warnings. FYI rm -rf no longer recurses upwards (. and ..) and hasn't done so for a very, very long time.

This problem is about breaking the BIOS in some way, something that you should not be able to do.

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Re:Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models by helper on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @12:06PM (#15971415)
This is in reference to the issue a few years ago where it was easy to wipe EFI vars via /sys, which would happen if you rm -rf / .[1] Wiping the EFI vars would brick your system.

[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UEFI-rm-...

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Re:Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models by msl on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @12:04PM (#15971395)
You used to be able (maybe still are?) to "rm" the files on a mounted efivarfs. See the relevant systemd issue ([1]).

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402

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Re:Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models by merb on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @02:48PM (#15973060)
well windows can get write access to these aswell. (just not by using rm or any other tool to remove files by default). I think this is a big difference and should probably be addressed. make /sys read-only and allow to write them differently with a interface where I need to call THIS_METHOD_CAN_BREAK_A_SYSTEM_IF_USED_INCORRECT_WRITE_SYS() command. but well, systemd guys will/won't do that.
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Re:Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models by JdeBP on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @03:38PM (#15973577)
It wasn't a systemd thing. The people who relate the tale as if it were a systemd thing or something that the systemd people did are ill-informed. Much as in the case of the headlined bug at hand, it was entirely a kernel thing. This was even stated outright at the time by the creator of that particular kernel mechanism.

To learn the real story, go and read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11152880 where you will find Matthew Garrett xyrself participating in the discussion.

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Re:Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models by mjg59 on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @03:30PM (#15973508)
Not any more. Non-spec variables are initially immutable, so can't be removed until you toggle that.
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Re:Ubuntu 17.10 corrupting BIOS of many Lenovo laptop models by detaro on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @12:07PM (#15971430)
And which you could do a few years back by rm-ing files from a virtual device that mapped to BIOS configuration.
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