3 ms·

You can actually brick a system if you put the wrong values in EFI. Linux even has put safeguards in place to avoid doing this with a `rm -rf /`. https://git.k

• hmm37 2y ago
  Yes I think that's possible, and then you would need to get e.g. a 8 pin bios programmer for $10-15. But... I think often times if a switch wasn't supposed to be flipped you could just yank the battery to try resetting the bios to default settings. But I don't know or rather I don't have much experience with this. I actually posted this because I just found out about this, and I didn't know you could do this in the first place and was wondering what others thought, or if they tried this before. I just tried this on a 2020 Dell laptop using linux since all the tools are actually on github. I haven't checked yet if it could be now undervolted but everything seem to work correctly. If it works I was also thinking about trying to edit the fan curves as well because there was actual variables for the temperatures that you could edit as well. That way you don't have to rely on dell-bios-fan-control programs, etc.
  • banish-m4 2y ago
    Pulling all of the batteries is unlikely to unbrick anything if Linux allowed write access to critical system-specific manufacture variables most users of other operating systems typically don't obliterate randomly. UEFI variables are typically stored in SPI EEPROMs, not battery-backed SRAM as ancient CMOS clock and BIOS data was.
    • redeeman 2y ago
      and that seems to be kindof a problem? in so far as possible, hardware should attempt to be unbrickable