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."

Comments

Not like Microsoft invented it...

[ackthpt]

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.

Re:Not like Microsoft invented it...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not like Microsoft invented it...

[kabloom]

But Amiga wasn't first. The Mac "Bomb" preceded it, and was notoriously useless for troubleshooting.

Error: Type 11

"But I keep typing 11 and nothing's happening"

Stupid boring new crash screen...

[Moofie]

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...

Re:Well on the upside

[mybecq]

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

Kind of like knowing that there were:
- 56 bulbs
- 24 horizontal grill bars
- 72 vertical ridges on 1600 sq ft of 1/4" steel
- 20% full gas tank
- 209,000 miles driven
- 3 tread patterns
- 5 axles
- 18 wheels

You still got hit by a truck.

Re:Keep it simple

[Sqwubbsy]

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).

You are so not a Mac owner based on these statements.

Re:Keep it simple

[Jahz]

Keep it simple AND keep it informative. A real BSOD will include information about the stop code and arguments at the time of death. If the system knows which driver caused the crash it will tell you this as well.
The Mac panic screen not only takes more resources to display but they tell you far less. "Please restart" in 23 different languages is not helpful. The 10.0 and 10.1 version looked much better.

Obviously you are NOT ready for the Mac. Come see the light, friend.

Do you really think that Apple have decided error codes and detailed crash reports are not important?? No, of course they have not. There are two reasons Apple does this.

1) The truth is that the infamous blue page of kernel farts that windows spews out are only to technicians or sysadmins. The home user, and in fact, the power users, can do nothing with it. Nothing, of course, except Google for the stop code and hope Microsoft has a techhelp article on what it means. You can reply to this and say that

STOP: 0x0000008E (c0000005, bf875fc3, f07bcd48, 00000000)
KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

makes perfect sense to you... but you'd be lying. I know that the relevent part is 8E but 99% of users NEVER NEED TO SEE THIS and will NEVER USE IT.

Back to Apple. Apple has a little ditty called the "CrashReporter" and it has an OSX front-end to the system's log filed in /var/log/. The logs contain all the nitty gritty about what was in the registers when the sytem exploded, what driver/module caused it, etc readily and easily recorded in the system log. Said information (like STOP: 0x0000000000000000008E) is for a tech or sysadmin, not a standard user.

2) What do you do with the BSOD info displayed?? A true nooblar would write it all down. That's a waste of time, becuase its also in Windows' system log. Assuming you're going to Google for it, you would presumably reboot the machine, right? So why did we even need to see the error when it happened? The machine is up not, and the logs are visible...??

Bottom line: Apple's goal is to keep things simple, clean and friendly. What would your parents rather see?

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?

P.S. - Don't even think about saying "what happens if you cant boot." If that is the case, remove the new hardware. Otherwise you are in DEEP trouble... the code doesnt really matter and you'd actually be better off reading the error from /var/log.