Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
In January 2013, a bug surrounding the UEFI implementation on some Samsung laptops went public, which caused them to be bricked after installing Linux in UEFI mode. While potential conflicts with a kernel module designed to access system features on Samsung laptops were initially blamed (also prompting kernel maintainers to disable the module on UEFI systems as a safety measure), Matthew Garrett discovered that the bug was actually triggered by storing too many UEFI variables to memory, and that the bug could also be triggered under Windows under certain conditions. In conclusion, he determined that the offending kernel module had caused kernel message dumps to be written to the firmware, triggering the bug.