Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 1 February 2016 at 08:14 AM EST. 38 Comments
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.