Linux 4.5-rc5: efivarfs fixed to avoid “rm -rf /” bricking UEFI

It shouldn't be possible to brick UEFI if it was sanely designed. That's a bad firmware.

Yes, its bad firmware, but the OS shouldn't allow a user to brick a machine even if the hardware vendor has broken firmware. Discovering the problem is unfortunate, but the OS folks not roping that area off is just wrong.

As usual when someone mentions "UEFI" and "sane" in the same sentence, I post this quote from Matthew Garret [1] (of Linux EFI maintainer fame):

""" UEFI stands for "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface", where "Firmware" is an ancient African word meaning "Why do something right when you can do it so wrong that children will weep and brave adults will cower before you", and "UEI" is Celtic for "We missed DOS so we burned it into your ROMs". """

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/444666/