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Keep it polite, folks.
Oh cool, I was banned from there last month.
Wasn’t the guy who made it banned? Is he the one who made that fuck America community of whatever it was called?
Madthumbs finally got some psychiatric help huh?
The posts are locked, so folks cannot comment. And the community itself is locked, so non-moderators cannot post. But madthumbs is a moderator.
Nothing loaded at all for me. So it looked like it just got nuked.
Oh, do you have the community blocked? I think, that would do that…
I dont remember doing it but I might have after he banned me with a snarky little message.
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?
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 whatcfdiskandmkfsare for, dammitrm -rf / won’t even run. Only sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root will
Really? Let me tr
Yeah 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.
yeah but what about
rm -rf ../../../.../var/lib/../../?
Its one guy(whos the mod) posting a bunch of stupid shit there. A bunch of the posts are just “i compared you to a minority group so i win the argument”. Some of the “memes” are so badly made that it actually shows you problems with windows more than linux.
I’ve seen the same thing. I remember thinking to myself a couple of times, “This isn’t the dunk you think it is.”
There’s clearly a fundamental misunderstanding there about how Linux development happens when the majority of the terrible memes treat the thousands of open source projects that go into the myriad of different distributions as a single monolithic effort run by some central authority. Or that there’s some coordinated effort to obscure the truth about switching from Windows because evangelizing the gospel of Linux is more important than everything else. And that’s beside the fact that so many of the memes aren’t even grounded in fact or are just badly outdated.
I’ve never bothered to interact with anyone there, and everyone is entitled to an opinion, but I legitimately think that there are issues at play here that go beyond mere preferences in operating systems. I won’t antagonize the situation because of that.
I do not have proof but this guy has definitely various accounts on Reddit.
For whatever reason, Reddit’s algorithm decided I should start seeing that community, and I’ve always struggled to figure out if it’s just Linux users shitposting, or if there are people out there who really just have huge boners for Microsoft
I also thought it was Linux shitposting, but I’ve had a few comments deleted there. I think they seriously hate Linux for some reason.
As a heavy Linux user, the more I use it, the more shit I talk on it.
I’m inclined to think former. Excepting X box players, I’ve never actually met anyone in real life who actually likes Microsoft. Only people who are forced to use it, and don’t feel like migrating to greener pastures.
Reddit?
Yeah, Reddit’s got /r/linuxsucks
That’s hilarious. Is that one also run by 2 mods that are the only ones that post?
It started out as ironic shit posting which attracted and built an unironic hate/conspiracy community
It’s happened over and over and over again lol
I love how he complains about being “brigaded” when the most comments on any post in the community is like 8.
That, and due to the relatively small nature of the fediverse, simply being in the new tab makes things likely to be seen for quite a bit, enough for ~8 users to come in and explain how backwards they’re being.
The community definitely has been brigaded though, as every single post (except one that is negative to Microsoft) has been downvoted to oblivion.
‘Brigading’ would be if pro-Linux communities were organizing to specifically target another community.
The fediverse is likely to attract the kinds of people interested in Linux in the first place, and all the negative attention that community attracts comes organically.
I talked with the user a bit in Linux_vs_Windows before they were booted from the community, and it’s my opinion that they just have a hate-boner going for Linux. It’s possible to have valid criticism of Linux, but they go way past legitimate and straight into obsession territory. They tend to post in that community daily. So their points aren’t exactly great (though sometimes they hit on a good meme) and they get the points they get naturally.
It’s not a conspiracy, their arguments just tend to be shit.
it’s not locked for me, did they reverse it?
Lazy stereotyping and wojaks, man that is a bottom tier “community”.
linux is terrible because removing the entire root folder can brick your system it should be more like windows where removing system32 can brick your system
The mention of UEFI in this context likely means they are thinking of a deletion recursing through sysfs and by extension deleting all visible UEFI variables which, in some firmware editions and versions, causes it not to be able to get through post or into the setup menu.
I vaguely recall this and the general issue was very bad firmware design, but it was possible to make it impossible to even reinstall a system. If you were industrious in windows you could have done the same thing, so malware under windows could also brick such platforms.
Of course rm has more safeguards on it so you have to pass more flags and really really be asking it to try to screw things up.
Nice to know.
So, I would assume the firmware gave write access to a part of permanent memory, critical to starting the system.
I feel like that would be someone like me, thinking of it as a feature and giving the possible values for those variables in the readme. And of course, who reads the readme even though it says “READ ME”?
UEFI defines a structured way to have data shared with OS as read write variables, including the ability to create, modify, and delete variables that UEFI can see.
However, some firmware used this facility to store values and then their code assumed the variables would always be there. The code would then crash when it goes to read a deleted variable and not know what to do. The thing is deleting those variables per spec is a perfectly valid the due the OS to do, but firmware was buggy and the bugs not caught because normally OS would not bother those variables except for a few standard popular ones, like boot order.
I see, in that case, that would not be someone like me :P as I tend to care about specifications.
This is a really useful explanation for someone who doesn’t know about the UEFI spec.
So flashing the firmware would “solve” the issue? As in, it should rewrite the variables missing (and everything else), making the hardware usable again?
Like you said, it was just some early implementations of UEFI. I haven’t heard of anything like this happening recently.
Also the kernel makes those variable immutable by default now, except the well known standard ones, so even for buggy UEFI this is mitigated nowadays. Just pointing out it came from a once legitimate space as a consequence of “everything is a file in a monolithic file namespace”. Which on the one hand is bad if someone uses rm with all sorts of flags to overrule the “you don’t want to do this” protections in the utility. On the other hand what you accidentally managed to do in Linux represented a problem that windows malware could have exploited.
Also the kernel makes those variable immutable by default now
More specifically it has done that for the last 8 years :-D
I was going to ask why anybody would want to move the root directory and where to but it was a joke right?
I’m a bit bias right now because I tried to install PopOS on a partition last night to see if i could play with it and make a media server. My VPN client failed to install properly, corrupted the OS and when I booted back to the live disk (Rufus made USB) I was able to format the partition but no longer install to it. The boot loader no longer works and it can’t get into any OS now.
I have to say I haven’t had this problem before, but working in IT and installing Windows on over 10 thousand computers in my career, this has happened to none.
(I’ll try another installer likely and format the partition over and see if another bootloader like grub will take and fix the issue).
Edit: changed course and said fuck it… formatted the entire drive and so much for the other data that was there. Clean install maybe the VPN client won’t botch everything this time.
Bootloader no worky can be caused by a hundred different issues. The installer may have removed the kernel or a CPIO archive (initramfs or processor microcode) that the bootloader needs. You could be missing some EFI program. If the boot entry is set to identify the root filesystem by its UUID, formatting/reinstalling would have changed the real UUID and then the bootloader wouldn’t be able to find it. Maybe installing the OS simply wiped or damaged that partition.
If you have to reinstall the OS, you should also reinstall the bootloader (the OS installer usually lets you do that from the GUI), or if you’re confident, update the boot entries to reflect the state of the computer. I strongly recommend using btrfs as your root filesystem instead of ext4, and use Timeshift to set up regular snapshots (btrfs) or backup clones (ext4) in case this happens again.
Darn, wish I would have read this prior to restarting the install after wiping the disk. I would have tried btrfs, it defaulted to ext4 as the machine was using mbr previously and not uefi for the boot, so I Rufus popped up with ext4 recommended and I ran with it
Ext4 is still perfectly fine. It’s a mature technology, and much more stable than btrfs. Your experience will not be any different because of this.
I still recommend using Timeshift. The only downside is that only the Rsync backup method will be available, which creates a full on-disk copy of your system files.
Thanks I’ll try it out once I set up the media server and figure out storage setup. Right now it just has an old 256ssd (sata) for the boot drive, originally was just taking 50gb for that and was going to use old 7200 drives for media storage. I assume I’ll need to have the time shift backups running to one of the other drives or it would be useless if the drive dies.
Yes, it’s best to store them on a separate hard drive. The target partition must be formatted as a Linux filesystem (ext2/3/4 or btrfs) in order to retain file ownership and permissions. I have a 512 GB partition on a hard drive reserved for the last three weekly backups and never ran out of space.
Funny that there’s a meme against open source on lemmy
Work switched from windows 10 to 11. Think im the only person who read all the terms and conditions before upgrading thier work machine. If you can honsetly agree to all of that, then go for it.
