CentOS - Feb 2016 - In A UEFI World, "rm -rf /" Can Brick Your System

In article <75D47FDC6A99F24F87A6465BAF326D5018C50F69 at
COLUMBA02.user.uu.se>,
Sorin Srbu <Sorin.Srbu at orgfarm.uu.se> wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at
centos.org] On
> > Behalf Of m.roth at 5-cent.us
> > Sent: den 1 februari 2016 20:34
> > To: CentOS
> > Subject: [CentOS] In A UEFI World, "rm -rf /" Can Brick Your
System
> > 
> > As a public service announcement, recursively removing all of your
files
> > from / is no longer recommended. 
> 
> I'm not following, has it ever been recommended (on a working system)??
> 
> Or is this one of those ironic posts? 8-)
I think the point is that hitherto, if you kill a system with "rm -rf
/",
you can still do a re-installation from scratch. If I understand correctly
what people are saying, killing the UEFI stuff stops you ever being able
to do a re-install on that box. Is that correct? Is there no way to do a
factory reset of the BIOS?

Cheers
Tony
-- 
Tony Mountifield
Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk
Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org

On Tue, 2 Feb 2016 10:18:09 +0000 (UTC)
Tony Mountifield wrote:
>  killing the UEFI stuff stops you ever being able to do a re-install on
that box. Is that correct?
Apparently so.
> Is there no way to do a  factory reset of the BIOS?
Apparently not.

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Real D 3D Digital Cinema ~ www.melvilletheatre.com

Once upon a time, Frank Cox <theatre at melvilletheatre.com>
said:
> On Tue, 2 Feb 2016 10:18:09 +0000 (UTC)
> Tony Mountifield wrote:
> >  killing the UEFI stuff stops you ever being able to do a re-install
on that box. Is that correct?
> 
> Apparently so.
Just to clarify: this appears to be a problem with some particular buggy
UEFI implementations; this is not a universal problem with the UEFI
design or anything.  It is unclear (just "some MSI boards") which
models/revisions/etc. have this particular problem.  There have been
other isolated UEFI implementation problems before (some Samsung laptops
for example, with a particular UEFI version and Linux kernel driver
version plus a samsung-laptop driver enabled).

This isn't meant to diminish the impact; certainly UEFI is proving to be
problematic in ways the BIOS wasn't (although the early days of "IBM
compatible BIOS" implementations also had weird issues from time to
time).

-- 
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>