efi: Make efivarfs entries immutable by default
"rm -rf" is bricking some peoples' laptops because of variables being
used to store non-reinitializable firmware driver data that's required
to POST the hardware.
These are 100% bugs, and they need to be fixed, but in the mean time it
shouldn't be easy to *accidentally* brick machines.
We have to have delete working, and picking which variables do and don't
work for deletion is quite intractable, so instead make everything
immutable by default (except for a whitelist), and make tools that
aren't quite so broad-spectrum unset the immutable flag.
Signed-off-by: Peter Jones <pjones@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Lee, Chun-Yi <jlee@suse.com>
Acked-by: Matthew Garrett <mjg59@coreos.com>
Signed-off-by: Matt Fleming <matt@codeblueprint.co.uk>
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt
index c477af0..686a64b 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.txt
@@ -14,3 +14,10 @@
efivarfs is typically mounted like this,
mount -t efivarfs none /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
+
+Due to the presence of numerous firmware bugs where removing non-standard
+UEFI variables causes the system firmware to fail to POST, efivarfs
+files that are not well-known standardized variables are created
+as immutable files. This doesn't prevent removal - "chattr -i" will work -
+but it does prevent this kind of failure from being accomplished
+accidentally.