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Blue Screen of Death for Mac OS X

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the creative-wastes-of-time dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Possibly nothing in the OS world has as much of a bad rap as the infamous BSOD (blue screen of death) in Microsoft Windows. On the other hand Apple hides the ugly kernel panics behind a nice looking GUI which only tells you its time to restart your dead system. Interestingly Mac OS X kernel has a secret API which lets you decide what your kernel panics are going to look like! In this Mac OS X Internals article Amit Singh explains how to use this API. Apparently you can upload custom panic images into the kernel and there's even a way to test these images by causing a fake panic. The article also shows the ultimate joke is to upload an actual BSOD image for authentic Windows looking panics right inside of OS X."

3 of 349 comments (clear)

  1. Not like Microsoft invented it... by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not like Microsoft invented it, either. I remember these quite unfondly. Before that I had a frozen screen on a C64. And before that I had stopped lights on the PDP-11 display. And before that we had random characters all over the screen of Ohio Scientific (OSI) computers.

    But Microsoft is widely credited with perfecting the BSoD and giving it fame.

    A system crash with a tasteful little box can be as easily dispised as all the the preceding. I suppose, like everything Apple is doing these days, they've given it a certain panache and now everybody will want one.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    1. Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
      It's not like Microsoft invented it, either.

      Microsoft had a single DEBUG line in the registry for Windows 95 -- it allowed the application of your choice to intercept the crash.

      The first commercially successful program to implement it was "Power Utilities 95 with Crashproof" that handled/exposed many hardware conflict sins without just covering them up.

      About 50K copies later and good shelf space at Frys/COMPUSA/BestBuy , Symantec took notice and put out their $29 Crashproofing program that didn't perform dozens of system checks or even unmask the cause of the crash.

      If version 1.0 of that Norton floppy disk consisted of anything more than copying a 1 line registry change and a pointer to a bitmap, then it never showed in practice.

  2. Stupid boring new crash screen... by Moofie · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's not NEARLY as cool as the car crash sound Macs used to make when they really, really, REALLY blew up fierce. Get a good pair of speakers, and that sound would scare the tar out of everybody in the area!

    I think it only happened to me once, on a junky old LCIII, while I was just working. There was a key combo to induce it on boot, though, and I got a lot of mileage out of that...

    --
    Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!