‘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 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.