Keep it polite, folks. No personal attacks against others, especially speculations regarding mental or emotional capabilities.
Most Linux haters have skill issue. I mean you can apply a complete Windows-mimicking skin to Ubuntu or Mint and use that
Omg the downvotes in that community 🤣
In A UEFI World, “rm -rf /” Can Brick Your System
efivars are made read only by the kernel. That firmware bug (!) was worked around in the kernel years ago.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.rst
Specifically in 2016: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ed8b0de5a33d2a2557dce7f9429dca8cb5bc5879
uefi is cringe anyway, reject uefi and return to grub in the system firmware
Firmware is one step before.
BIOS, UEFI, coreboot, or whatever weird code runs on a Raspberry Pi’s GPU to load your system, those are firmwares.
The firmware is what starts your bootloader; grub, BOOTMGR, u-boot, etc
even if my grub is in the system eeprom?
Oh I’ve never heard of such a setup. But that does muddy the lines a bit, I can see the argument for calling it part of firmware then.
yeah it’s goofy, you can embed grub in coreboot cbfs and load straight into it, skipping the bios/uefi stage. it’s a bit difficult to set up (and you need coreboot supported hardware) but when you get it working the boot times become really quick
i just realised though that you can embed Linux into cbfs as well, does that then mean that Linux could be my kernel and firmware at the same time?
Wow very cool. Thanks for that link, I had no idea coreboot was so flexible!
rm -rf /
can brick your systemWell good thing there’s basically no legitimate reason to ever even use
rm -rf /
anyway so GNU version is perfectly within its rights to refuse to do that by default, am I right? If you know what you’re doing and want to nuke partitions, that’s whatcfdisk
andmkfs
are for, dammitYeah like so could deleting system32, and there were plenty of memes about that also.
‘Bricked’ in this sense meaning not that you’d just trash your OS and need a reinstall, but that it could actually stop your computer from booting at all. So the system32 analogy doesn’t exactly fit.
It’s because some motherboards implement UEFI in a way that allows important variables to be overwritten by I/O processes. Executing
sudo rm -rf /*
would recursively go into the EFI parameters folder where the kernel mounts EFI variables and attempt to delete things. Some motherboards allowed these delete operations to remove things in the motherboard’s firmware it needs to complete POST, thus rendering the motherboard useless.But that’s a problem with the motherboard, not with Linux or Windows. The same damage can be caused by Windows.
So that meme reminds me of a prank.
There was once I had the same exact laptop as a buddy, but wasn’t using it anymore. He was finishing his degree and just about to turn in like 8 papers/assignments and had a ton of work saved on it. So I wiped my laptop and installed fresh Kubuntu, and then swapped the drives when he wasn’t looking. Then I pretended to have done him a favor since he had been having intermittent windows problems.
He was livid but was trying so hard to be kind, loool. Made it better when I could swap it right back and everything was there
That prank is so mischievous.
It was so good because I could be as rotten as I wanted, there was zero lasting harm. He immediately forgave me and found it amazing once he booted up the original drive and made sure it was all good
When I removed the knife from his throat he immediately assured me that he didn’t have any grievances whatsoever.
That was just a huge dick move.
Maybe if afterwards I showed him the knife was made of painted wood, blunted completely, and I snuck a throat protector in his turtleneck.
I did more things like checking a windows install on my laptop first, and cloning his drive off before I pulled it.
We would regularly pull pranks on each other, the rule was it couldn’t cause lasting harm. This fit well within that, and he got me at least as good multiple times. One of my best friends, ever
Your lack of empathy is appalling. Not your fault, but it’s not considered normal to not understand that stressing out someone is really bad. It’s a psycopathic trait, check this out.
So what’s the benefit of temporarily putting your friend in distress? What got better as a result of you scaring them?
Um, our relationship? Have you ever had friends where you prank each other? The trust it engenders when you show you can play in that space but still not cause any lasting harm pulls people closer. At least it has in my experience. He’s one of my best friends ever
If someone who I considered a friend pulled that kind of stunt with me I would have one fewer friend. Screwing with people is rude and it’s plain bully behavior when you know they’re stressed and you mess around with a thing that is cruicial for them. You had fun at someone else’s expense.