apparently "rm -rf /" can brick some motherboards. go uefi! With systemd? mike-burns: with UEFI. Since the EFI partition is mounted on /boot/efi on a GRUB system. Probably similarly on EFI aware BSD. So if you blow away some EFI blob that the motherboard depends on, it could fail to boot. Only if the securelevel is 0, as I understood it. And also only if the device is mounted rw. That's extremely poor engineering on part of the manufacturers. My /boot/efi is mounted rw. It should be ro! What does the securelevel have to do with it? If my vendor depends on some blob in the EFI system partition to boot, and I delete it, then I couldn't boot? "OpenBSD has long prohibited even root from direct hardware access by defaulting to “securelevel” 1." - tedu on Lobste.rs. But EFI partition is just fat32. If you remove a file from it, it's gone. I don't think securelevel is going to save you from that. But mount ro is! I think you're confusing /boot/efi with /sys/firmware/efi/efivars? I might be. Anyway, this is not a problem on the X1 carbon, as I've formatted my EFI system partition and was able to boot just fine. On Linux at least, root can write to efivars, but that's probably a good thing to protect in some way via securelevel. Though one is unable to add a boot loader to the list without being able to write to that. Either way: EFI seems pretty broken in default installs, and perhaps in general. Why are people rm-rf'ing / or /boot/efi ? Maybe they want a new laptop? Well I'm glad someone tried it so we can learn what happens. Yeah! hail ARP! i don't it's the EFI system partition so mucch as the EFI vars partition I kind of like/dislike EFI. Apparently the specifications are 2000+ pages. i like the "basic" features. mercutio: right, dne mentioned cleared that :p UEFI - on the one hand, you get a well defined, thoroughly designed specification. On the other hand, it's somewhat insane. ahh but it was before mhoran was saying he cleared EFI SP BIOS sortof just shook out of a bunch of people implementing similar systems, slowly becoming a defacto standard. i've been playing with amiga stuff recently. it's amazing how much simpler stuff iss although they hit some 4GB limits etc. Pffft how dare they use 32bit unsigned integers well it was the early 90s. That's what she said!! i think it's interesting the way amiga just has devices/libraries in the rom I demand 128-bit address space! and you can replace them when booting so in a way you have a kind of modular "bios" people have custom flashed their own roms etc too adding devices etc i think the pc bios's were pretty modular too after a while actually They were hookable, yes. but i think that's mostly about addons like whether you want pxe boot roms etc Nowadays, yes. Earlier on, it was hard drive/SCSI controllers predominately. heh. asrock added support for nvme boot on z77 board in beta bios but usually bios updates are far and few between for new hardware on old boards i have z77 board and nvme ssd, i should try it :) Thanks to the wonders of the UEFI architecture, my "bios" can connect to the Internet, check for, and download updates. All with a few mouseclicks. so can mine Crazy, fun times. i always get asrock boards now :) you can't set static ip though is yours asrock too? Intel. oh interesting asus boards don't seem to do that gigabyte i won't touch :) are you using systemd-bootd? err systemd-boot i've finally ditched grub on uefi systems :) I boot with rEFInd actually. ahh anyone follow the Iowa caucus?