[arch-general] Instructions to mount efivars as readonly should be linked to in Beginner's Guide

[Tomasz Kramkowski]

On Mon, Feb 01, 2016 at 11:11:14AM -0600, Doug Newgard wrote:
> On Mon, 01 Feb 2016 22:27:01 +0530
> Jayesh Badwaik <archlinux at jayeshbadwaik.in> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I have read the dangers of mounting efivars as writable recently, and I think 
> > there should be an entry in the archlinux installation guide and beginner's 
> > guide which should say exactly what is said in the warning in [1], and then 
> > link to [1] for further instructions. 
> > 
> 
> The "dangers" are only if you do something dumb and your firmware is equally
> dumb. Even then, hopefully the kernel will take care of it.
> https://gist.github.com/mjg59/8d9d494da56fbe6d8992

Since when does "do something dumb" and "potentially hard brick your
motherboard" become synonymous when speaking in terms of computers?

There's doing something dumb (by accident or otherwise) and then there's
bricking your motherboard, people make accidents all the time but since
modern day computers are quite nice and rugged, the only losses are data
losses.

I might shed a few tears over the loss of some not-backed up data, but I
would be quite a bit more pissed off if I lost a valuable and expensive
piece of hardware (granted, it would have to have a misconfigured and
shitty EFI, but since when is "being misconfigured and shitty" a rare
occurance?).

The newbies this change is aimed for are exactly the sorts of people who
might unwittingly rm -rf /.

-- 
Tomasz Kramkowski | GPG: 40B037BA0A5B8680 | Web: https://the-tk.com/
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