From ed8b0de5a33d2a2557dce7f9429dca8cb5bc5879 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Peter Jones Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2016 14:48:15 -0500 Subject: efi: Make efivarfs entries immutable by default "rm -rf" is bricking some peoples' laptops because of variables being used to store non-reinitializable firmware driver data that's required to POST the hardware. These are 100% bugs, and they need to be fixed, but in the mean time it shouldn't be easy to *accidentally* brick machines. We have to have delete working, and picking which variables do and don't work for deletion is quite intractable, so instead make everything immutable by default (except for a whitelist), and make tools that aren't quite so broad-spectrum unset the immutable flag. Signed-off-by: Peter Jones Tested-by: Lee, Chun-Yi Acked-by: Matthew Garrett Signed-off-by: Matt Fleming --- Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt | 7 +++++++ 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+) (limited to 'Documentation') diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt index c477af086e65..686a64bba775 100644 --- a/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt +++ b/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt @@ -14,3 +14,10 @@ filesystem. efivarfs is typically mounted like this, mount -t efivarfs none /sys/firmware/efi/efivars + +Due to the presence of numerous firmware bugs where removing non-standard +UEFI variables causes the system firmware to fail to POST, efivarfs +files that are not well-known standardized variables are created +as immutable files. This doesn't prevent removal - "chattr -i" will work - +but it does prevent this kind of failure from being accomplished +accidentally. -- cgit v1.2.3-58-ga151