Blue Screen of Death for Mac OS X 349
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."
Re:Well on the upside (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm.. poster hasn't used osx much (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sort of unrelated (Score:2, Interesting)
Old and Busted: BSOD. New: RSOD (Score:2, Interesting)
Red is so much scarier.
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/05/07/
Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... (Score:4, Interesting)
that is precisely true.
My machine at work has some kind of hardware problem that was never quite solved while it was under applecare. it "panics" at least once a day, some days, it'll "panic" 5-10 times. Some things that set it off are scrolling in a terminal window (such as when I'm sync'ing portage on our server) or putting an audio CD in the lower optical drive.
The last time we brought it to tekserve, they claimed that both scsi drives were bad and they replaced them, and we didn't have a panic for a couple months, but by the time they came back (and with a vengence, I might add), there was no more applecare coverage...
I quote "panic" because sometimes I get that nice pretty "please restart your computer" screen, sometimes I get the text dump on the desktop, and sometimes the machine locks up, altogether.
luckily, we're getting one of those nice quad-xeon machines as soon as adobe releases the new creative suite, at which point I'll throw this machine out of a window.
I've had... let's see... (Score:2, Interesting)
That's about 6 years now.
Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Keep it simple (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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
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?
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
Re:Gray screen of death (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... (Score:1, Interesting)
I wouldn't trust an option like that to begin with. Something unexplained happened in the kernel - probably memory corruption. In this broken state, are you going to trust the filesystem code to update all those complex data structures correctly? The traditional Unix answer is to write to a dedicated crash partition, which is much simpler. The RedHat answer [redhat.com] is to not touch the disk at all - instead, send the data over the network. It's much harder to damage anything while doing that.
Re:I have only seen the Screen of Death on OS X on (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... (Score:3, Interesting)