On Tue, 2 Feb 2016 10:49:10 +0100
Jaromil <jaromil@???> wrote:

> On Tue, 02 Feb 2016, Wim wrote:
>

> >    [2]https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
> >    Well, you've probably guessed the answer - Won't fix.  

>
> meanwhile, on the background, the usual bullying goes on among the
> systemd hooligans, sarcastically liquidating the concern with some
> cynical remarks, as if it would be a deserved punition for users
> caught into a bricked laptop rather than an erased filesystem:

I think I've established my bone-fides as a systemd hater, and
Poettering's decision to leave this thing read/write instead of
having it r/o and having his utilities rw/change/ro is just typical
Freedesktop/Redhat/Poettering nonsense, but I want to make sure nobody
loses sight of the real culprit here: UEFI.

Back in the BIOS/MBR days, we had a very thin, very tiny interface to
the pre-boot stuff. About the only way you could mess it up was to blow
a bios upgrade, so you were always *very* careful during that process.
But in every other respect with BIOS/MBR, nothing you could do in
software could damage your hardware.

BIOS/MBR had a very thin interface.

Now comes UEFI, with this huge interface, to its pre-boot firmware and
non-volatile RAM, intended to be accessed by run of the mill
application programs and even commands typed in at the command prompt.
How is this exposure of many different "EFI variables" to every
possible software on the system different from systemd's spaghetti web
of dependencies?

Answer: It's not. It's one more case of abdication of modularity.

In the old days, you could do *anything* in the user or kernel space,
confident that nothing you did touched the pre-boot. Now, preboot and
OS are welded together.

And what you get is the same: Hard to troubleshoot because you can't
tell who talked to whom. And in the case of UEFI, the very real
likelihood of hardware destruction.

Yeah, MBR was getting old and perhaps needed replacement. But UEFI is a
step down from the 30 year old MBR. Hey, where have I heard that logic
before?

SteveT

Steve Litt
February 2016 featured book: The Key to Everyday Excellence
http://www.troubleshooters.com/key