Blue Screen of Death for Mac OS X

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday September 11, 2006 @11:07AM 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."

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Well on the upside by OverlordQ · 2006-09-11 11:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

The Win32 BSOD does give you better information so you can try to diagnose the problem.

Which is kinda lacking in the OSX Panic screen.

--
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
1. Re:Well on the upside by kevmo · 2006-09-11 16:03 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I find it very useful for the rare occasions that I get BSODs anymore to at least know what driver caused the problem. If the BSOD lists something like atixxxxx, then I know that my video card screwed up, and so on. Because almost all of my crashes are caused by driver or hardware problems, its helpful knowing just what that problem is so I can fix the driver or replace the hardware (and thus almost never get crashes on that computer in the future).