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by AdmiralGinge 2307 days ago
Isn't that only a GNU and FreeBSD thing? I think other Unixes will still let you rm -rf /.

On FreeBSD you can do

    sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/mem
and it will do exactly that, write random crap into your memory without any sort of safeguard, causing a spectacular crash and a console that looks like it's having a seizure. Linux won't let you do that unless it's been compiled with a flag to enable full access to /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
1 comments

I want to try that dd command. For fun. Just to see what happens on OpenBSD.

No lasting effects are there? Besides a crash, afterwards I shouldn't have any memory issues, right?

I tried this in a FreeBSD VM and it booted fine afterwards. OpenBSD wouldn't let me do it at all for some reason.

Obviously no warranty on bare metal/systems that are actually used for anything.