Yeh I wasn't laying blame on the *nix side of things either. No OS should be able to do this because the OS shouldn't have that level of control over the system it's sittting upon. Firmware absolutely shouldn't fail to a broken state. If you hose some configuration and it crashes, it should revert back to a known good configuration e.g.: a factory reset / fail-safe configuration.
You shouldn't be able to hose it completely except through special equipment, for example by connecting to system programming terminals on the motherboard with external hardware. The fact that a higher-level system can damage a lower-level system is just bad design.
You shouldn't be able to hose it completely except through special equipment, for example by connecting to system programming terminals on the motherboard with external hardware. The fact that a higher-level system can damage a lower-level system is just bad design.