&gt; goes against the Unix philosophy of &quot;root can do anything.&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a useful perspective here. This is not a feature - nothing should ever want to permanently brick a motherboard, there&#x27;s no use case for that. There&#x27;s no benefit to allowing root to do this. The OS is supposed to abstract the hardware in a way that it can be safely operated.