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Blue Screen of Death for Mac OS X
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."
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
Sort of unrelated:
I used to have BSOD as my screen saver for an earlier version of Fedora (IIRC). It was always amusing when people would stop by to chat, a little while later, they'd see my PC suddenly BSOD! The looks I'd see (on other people's faces) makes me laugh just remembering.
Who will guard the guards?
Likewise in windows you can change the background color and text color of the BSOD (or at least you could uder 98, I haven't had the desire to play around with it under 2000 / XP since they crash much less frequently).
Philosophy.
I, for one, welcome our new department-wide goatse.cx kernel panic message.
Any of you guys hiring?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
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.
Hardly the ultimate joke. Jokes are supposed to be original. This has been a screen saver under Linux for years.
Anyway, couldn't this be described as the ultimate joke?
Once upon a time, I was chairing an out-of-town meeting with a roomful of engineers. We spent most of the morning working a spreadsheet with margin calculations on it trying to come up with a margin budget that everyone could live with; I was running the machine that drove the projector.
The conversation took a turn away from the spreadsheet, and after a bit the BSOD came up onscreen. The panic in the room was palpable -- everyone figured we'd just lost the whole morning, and quite a few had afternoon flights out.
So I hit the shift key and entered my password to unlock the screen.
The classic BSOD screensaver gets the same amusement factor without the hassle of hacking OSX.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Back early on there was a bug in OS X which I think slashdot mentioned that caused a BSOD it required moving a directory into itself. Besides that one time I havn't seen the BSOD. after over 4 years of using my powerbook even doing stuff that it shouldn't be doing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Leave it to Apple to give you a choice when it comes to Panic screens. Does Vista do this yet?
If you have an unstable system (BSOD-worthy), then it is probably best to rely on as few system resources as possible. THis includes GUIs etc. That's why a simple text-based BSOD or oops handler is a better idea than something that tries to do a whole bunch of cute graphics etc (which relies on a whole lot more hardware & software to be working properly).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I know that Mac users are supposed to be more friendly towards Windows users switching over but changing the kernal panic screen to match the BSOD is going too far. If you want it that badly, install Windows on a separate partition.
I'd personally go for a nice old fashioned Guru Meditation Error. :) *Digs around his garage for his A500*
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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!
I have gotten the gray screen of death twice on my Quad.
When capturing QuickTime video, QuickTime writes one copy of the file and then makes another. If you are capturing to a mastering codec (ie animation) minutes can become gigabytes. It is easy to fill up the internal HD in this case.
What can easily happen in this case is the file writing routines will start writing over allocated blocks. System files, even track zero. If it writes over track zero, your internal hard drive will be destroyed.
How do I know this? It happened to me twice.
The second time, I was left with a 17 GB file on my hard drive that can not be deleted by any means other than reformatting the disk. The first time it happened, the HD was borked so bad that plugging it into another Mac caused that mac to kernel panic. Apple replaced the drive but I lost everything minus my backups.
As I was told by an Apple tech, when a hd starts up the dirve itself checks the validity of track zero. If it is invalid, you have a hardware fault and this generates a kernel panic.
This was all validated by Apple techs.
You have been warned. Hope this helps someone.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
"The article also shows the ultimate joke is to upload an actual BSOD image for authentic Windows looking panics right inside of OS X."
Ya! and then we could like, (snicker, snicker) we could like, bring up pictures of toilet paper on the monitor (snicker, snicker) and they would think (hehe, snicker) they would think they got T.P.'ed! HAHAHAHA!!!!!111!!!
Did anyone else just develop a twitch in their left eye?
It already has a black screen of death. Favourite for causing it is to plug in certain brands of firewire hard drive (once did it with a USB network card too).
If the OS itself hasn't failed just the GUI you get the spinning wheel of death..
Never heard of any kind of option that "hides the ugly kernel panics behind a nice looking GUI".. possibly a 3rd party app he's installed.
Maybe Linux needs to adopt this so as to ease the transition from MS Windows.
No, but with the right command-line tools, you might be able to do it yourself without being infected.
Just be careful this doesn't open a backdoor on your computer. *rimshot*
If the aptly named blue screen of death is indeed the ultimate joke, people should die laughing at it.
God spoke to me.
My only one was when I brought the machine back from sleep, the thing was that I put the machine to sleep during a OS upgrade... I rebooted, reinstalled the upgrade, and everything worked nicely.
please excuse my apathy
There were rumors, before XP came out, that they were going to respond to the iMac by making the Blue Screen of Death available in five designer colors.
Whatever happened to the Longhorn / Vista 'Red Screen of Death'?4 15335.aspx
Red is so much scarier.
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/05/07/
A good joke would consist of the following steps:
1) set an Intel build of MacOS to display the BSoD
2) instal bootcamp and a copy of XP, but never actually boot into XP
3) find and install a cheep faulty RAM module that allows MacOS to kernel panic with some degree of frequency.
4) bring the Mac in for service at an Apple store
5) claim that MacOS started displaying the BSoD after you installed Windows.
6) wait for someone to pick up the red phone to Cupertino.
If you're dealing with an older Mac vet, add an obscure reference to Rhapsody and "Red Box" for bonus points and added confusion.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
That would be the slashdot audience, right?
wake up and hold your nose
You young punks and blue-screens-of-panic blah, blah blah!
...In my day, we didn't even HAVE screens, just a blinking light and if that light ever stopped blinking, you knew there was trouble, boy...
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
sometime ago I used BSOD as the screen saver on a Mac (for a short time, on a G3?)
Redmond, start your photocopiers!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
doubtful. been on OS X now for a number of years, not one single kernel panic.
Maybe half a dozen? That's since 2000, when I installed the Beta, and then 10.1. Two causes: when I installed Panther, I got a new USB hub at the same time. Half my kernel panics right then. It was a bad hub that delivered less than its rated power. BAM! Later, when I moved up to the G5, I moved my old OS over from the G4. I used Carbon Copy Cloner, but I screwed up something -- I now use SuperDuper! because it's a real Mac app -- and something got really screwy about root and my admin account. Again, another three reboots. Did a fresh erase and install, no problems since then.
That's about 6 years now.
A thus, a VERY slow news day...
to crash much less frequently != to be stable
So say we all
BSoD is for the NT (and XP) lines. Win9x is a blue screen, not a BSoD.
The *reason* it called a BSoD, is because the computer will not do *anything* without a reboot. This is not usually the case under 9x.
Have you read my journal today?
The BSoD is much less common on 2000 and XP. Instead it just has a bunch of nasty DLL errors that require a reinstall.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The article also shows the ultimate joke is to upload an actual BSOD image for authentic Windows looking panics right inside of OS X.
Ah man, now THAT'S humor. If by humor, you mean stupid.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I know it's off-topic, but I just had to share the image that came to mind when I first read this:
:-)
Once upon a time, I was chairing an out-of-town meeting with a roomful of engineers...
Picture, if you will, a meeting room filled with terrified engineers, all cowering behind one end of the table and desperately trying to shield their heads from ballistic chairs, being hurled by a Donkey-Kong like Steve Ballmer, who in turn is jumping up and down upon the far end of the table...
I know the Steve Ballmer jokes are old and off-topic (and I don't mean to compare you to him) but the image of "chairing" a meeting full of engineers was just to hilarious not to share.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
... you likely had just saved your program, the switches were probably permanently set to the bootstrap loader address anyway, two (three?) switch flips and you're back in a whopping 20 seconds...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
You can change it, but you'll probably never see it! haha... ive seen mine only once in the 18 months I've owned my PB.
... Macs Crash Different
;)
And don't get me wrong, I'm typing this on a Mac and I would not trade it for anything else out there
Here we go again. Today, it's Umbral Blot's turn to have posts that came from rational, critical thinking twisted into "pro-M$ astroturfing" at the hands of the ever-spiteful Twitter.
How do you live, Twitter? Seriously. How can you possibly function in society with this much venom and hate spewing forth from every word you say? Can you make it from Study Hall to Algebra without the kicker from the football team shoving you in a locker?
I don't care how you do it, Twitter. Go to therapy, go to church, whatever. GET HELP!
This sig intentionally left blank.
Never had one on Windows XP, and have had exactly one on Windows 2000 with a bad stick of RAM. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, zealot.
I got a BSOD while reading these comments, no joke :P
As a long time Mac user, I remember (not so) fondly the "System Bomb" graphic (a black spherical bomb with a lit fuse) that Apple used for system crashes prior to OSX. And those system bombs happend all the time, much more than blue screens of Win3x, Win95, or NT. But yes, the "System Bomb" pic was cuter than a blue screen with a bunch of white text, so it was in keeping with Apple's attention to "style" (even for crashes). ;-)
(And of course, today apple uses the "Spinning beachball of death" for app hangs (but not for system crashes).)
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I got a kernel panic on OSX 10.1 (some networking problem), but that's the only time. It was white with black text, if I recall correctly, displaying a bunch of unix jargon. :-)
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I decided to go and read this article because i'm in search of an authentic BSOD image, but the links in the article are dead.
Any pointers as to where i can get one?
I'm getting a strange feeling that I've read this before...
I caused a panic on a iBook I bought spring of '04 by inserting a USB drive into the appropriate slot. Killed the system so bad that, after an hour with Apple support the OS had to be re-installed. Depressing.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Yeah, but if you had MacsBug installed, you'd just type ea or es and exit the offending application, never seeing the bomb at all. Without Macs bug, you could push the programmer's switch and type GO Finder, but that was less reliable.
Heck, I rarely even lost data in those crashes since I'd dump the offending application's data space to a logfile and reconstruct what I could from there.
Too bad I never could get mouse support for MacsBug working properly. That would've saved much manual retyping of addresses.
Kernel Panic's superior officer is General Protection Fault.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
For extra craptacularity, do this while installing a system update. Then you get to manually install the update in single user mode before your system will be bootable again. When I say manually, I mean manually extracting files from the pax archive and copying them to the appropriate location because systemupdate thinks that everything is OK despite dozens of system files modified by the update being mysteriously zero bytes in length.
In my defense, the update was taking a long time, the second monitor was a my TV, and my PowerBook is my DVD player.
The moderators now work for microsoft. Anything which may be interpeted as negative about MS results in automatic troll mods. Have a nice day. :-)
Oh shit, remind me to never use MS Windows for anything important.
You actually need a reminder???
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
On a Windows machine anyway...
Wait until somebody goes AFK.
Take a screenshot of their desktop, save to My Documents.
Right-click -> Arrange by -> Uncheck Show Desktop Icons
Set desktop background to bitmap you saved
Hide Start menu
Watch as their computer magically "quits responding"
I prefered the Sad Machttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_mac with the Chimes of Deathhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimes_of_Death.
Today no less, at the local Apple store I got a kernal panic "You need to restart your computer" message. All I did was put OmniDazzle on a new Mac Pro.
What surprised me was that I had only ever seen the kernal panic only once before after using OS X daily over two years... and that was when I was trying to crash it. (Hint: disabling network adapters and enabling others while connected to an SMB share can cause unpredictable results under 10.3)
While changing the crash message is interesting, it's not something that will make that much of a difference. I'm not going to say that OS X doesn't crash; after all, I managed to crash one by doing something rather safe. It's just not going to be a practical joke that has a quick payoff.
I usually couldn't run Win95 or Win98 for more than about 6 hours without having problems that needed a reboot to fix. When I had to use 95/98 at work, I would reboot my PC every morning and again at lunch; if I skipped the lunchtime reboot I very rarely made it to the end of the workday without it crashing in the middle of something. WinXP can run for days without crashing. Notice I said it can run for days without crashing, not that you can't get it to crash.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Yeah, that's what he meant. His joke wasn't very clear.
MS made XP reboot on every BSOD starting with service pack 2. Thank goodness for the boot menu F8->"Do not restart on system failure". Some problems would be nearly impossible to diagnose otherwise without an os reinstall.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Yes, if you must use the Sysinternals BSoD screensaver, grab it now before MS makes it disappear. It's fun for a few laughs and looks genuine enough even with the SYSINTERNALS_GREAT_SITE messages.
I am warning you however, don't put this on your work computer if you work in the IT department and especially if you like to keep unsaved work in running apps on your locked system as your well-intentioned co-workers will try to fix your system. Thanks guys!
To quell some FUD.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Most M$ and Apple fanboys won't know what you are talking about when you mention 'Paper Tape' They probably think you are talking about DUCT Tape.
Ah Those were the days. I still have my Paper Tape Repair kit from my days at DEC.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED means that an exception occurred in kernel code that did not have an encompassing __try block. In other words, it's an exception that the system did not expect.
Almost always, it's caused by a driver programmer that did not know what they were doing when they wrote the driver. Even if the exception occurs somewhere in ntkrnlmp.exe, it's usually some dumb driver's fault. Bugchecks caused entirely by Microsoft code are uncommon.
If I owned a Mac, I'd want to see that information. It makes sense to disable it by default, but people like Slashdotters do want to see it.
By the way, you don't see this in Windows XP or Vista. XP and Vista reboot immediately on a bugcheck by default then display "The system has recovered from a serious error" when they come back up, with no technical details unless you ask for them. Getting a blue screen when the kernel bugchecks requires going to a menu 99% of users don't know exists.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I didn't even know, because my Mac has never crashed.. ever. My Windows XP machine just reboots itself. I'm supposed to think it overheated or something, I guess. Very clever.
i see it occationaly, but it seems to be always when it wakes up from sleep with my usb sandisk memory stick mounted.
i try to remove it before it sleeps, but sometimes i forget.
I hear the OS X is available for PC:s now. True or not?
Im sure there are some much better kernel panic ideas than a BSOD?
...
How about a Guru Meditation ? http://guru.simon.net.nz/
There must be some other cool ones out there?
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
... I've been using Mac OS X for a few years now and had never seen that reboot request, tought it alredy bloqued on me a few times!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
why we have to choose?
1. A pleasant semi-transparent overlay that asks them to reboot their machine (in their native language)
2. A solid blue screen reading "KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" followed by 30 rows of random-like numbers
Which one?
It's perfectly possible for a bsod to have a part that tells the user "Hey, sorry, but you need to restart your computer.", and have a second part that says: "Technical information: blablabla, you can look at www.yourdistro.com/kernelpanic or use Google for more detailed info..."
Trust me, I work for the government.
... the LCIII used to make a noise like a funeral in a supermarket. I recall it well, since I got it a lot thanks to not seating my additional 4MB SIMM correctly.
...
The crash didn't appear until PowerMacs
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
I've heard of kernel panics, but have yet to experience one. Like most Mac users, I remember (hatefully) the old "bomb box" from pre-OS X Mac operating systems. But I have not experienced a kernel panic in OS X and I've used it since Jaguar through Panther and now Tiger.
Oddly enough, I have an old G3 iMac and use XCode to develop AppleScript Studio applications. You'd think I would have had a panic by now!
I strongly suspect that folks that have frequent panics have over-loaded their Macs with lots of third-party extensions. Which puzzles me, given the "out-of-the-box" functionality of OS X. What do you want it to do, make coffee for you?
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
Can you make it from Study Hall to Algebra without the kicker from the football team shoving you in a locker?
Considering he's married with kids, I damn well hope so.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Twitter, please just admit that you have no experience with Windows post-win98 other than watching from afar, and therefore that you have no idea what you're talking about. It shines through in all your posts.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
also, on that last link, Iced DOESN'T agree with you. Anyone with a reasonable level of reading comprehension would see that he was taking the piss.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
that'll teach me to mess with third party USB drivers
Let me check ... yep, for some reason, that's a valid excuse for Macs, but a lame one for Windows.
Nevermind - carry on! ;)
I was hoping you'd do something like this sometime! Now I get a chance to make a most sorry attempt to justify my posting habits!
Thank you! You just confirmed the point I made in the link!
I'd say "you must be new here", but you might not get that facet of Slashdot subculture, either.
I did make a bit of a mistake on that one, but I try to right my wrong in your next link. Perhaps seeing the whole thread will help you notice that
Two more things about that link:
It was a poor attempt at satire. But I should have expected that you would agree with it literally. You were the object of the satire, after all.
Oh, and since you like links so much, I thought I'd leave you with an analysis some of your own. However, I have neither the time nor patience to go through them all myself, but fortunately two posters have done it for me.
I remember the first GSOD (Grey...) I got on OS X. I plugged in a pysically damaged USB stick.
Ironically, Windows XP, in the same situation just gave me a message saying the USB device was malfunctioning...
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Once again, you fail to address any of my points and post such an intellectually troglodytic phrase such as "the joke is all on you". I can assume you don't have any way to defend against them. I win.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
I have an old G3 iMac and use XCode to develop AppleScript Studio applications.
... the EE/CS undergrads all shared the one machine in the basement of Cory Hall.
I wouldn't expect that application programs in an interpreted language would do anything to cause panics.
I mean, at Finals Week at Berkeley in 1980 we had over 60 people at a time logged in and developing "C" code on a single PDP-11/70
What's most likely to cause panics is driver problems, file system problems (HFS+ isn't all that robust, I've had it blow chunks when I've left it running at less than 10% free space), and hardware problems. Application level stuff is really unlikely to panic the kernel.
What do you want it to do, make coffee for you?
Yep, iceCoffee is one of the extensions I use.
"But it is true that Windows rarely crashes. Or maybe it's more accurate to say it either never crashes or it always does, but mostly it never does. As most crashes (in my experience) are caused by unsigned drivers, you're either going to have a problem or you're not. But mostly you're not. And if you do, fixing it is usually as simple as just updating the driver."
So it might be, or maybe not, then again it could be, but most likely it isn't, in any case update your drivers.. sheesh you sound like you work in tech support.
I don't know what you guys are talking about. I have used a pismo since 2000, (which crashed all the time in OS9). A year or two later, I installed OS X, and never crashed again. Applications bite it now and again, but never the OS. No longer do I have to embarrassingly reach for the main power switch to bring the box back from the results of turkey software. I almost forget what that was like. This laptop is in constant use, never shut down, except to travel somewhere or update software that requires restarts. Why anybody would put themselves through the pain and utter misery of a using a horribly-designed and bug-riddled OS, is beyond me. Life is too damned short.
Yes, I'm a clear thinker and therefore immune to the Reality Distortion Field. Those who are fully under the effect of the Field think they're "creative" and call those with logic "brickheaded literalists".
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Yes. Are you moronic, by any chance? That would explain a lot.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
What about "Yellow Box"?
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World