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."
Not like Microsoft invented it... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not like Microsoft invented it, either. I remember these [wikipedia.org] 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.
Keep it simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Keep it simple (Score:5, Funny)
You are so not a Mac owner based on these statements.
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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.
Re:Keep it simple (Score:4, Informative)
It does not take appreciably more resources either way, and both code paths are fairly simple and well tested.
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
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What about the other 8? I think you've got a typo there.
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Real Programmers don't mix up array indexing and counting the length of an array.
And since the joke envolves the length of the array and not the index of it's last member, I guess the jokes on you.
Re:Keep it simple (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Take more resources"?? The system has crashed! It's not like it's stealing precious RAM from your WoW instance, it's a single write into the framebuffer on an otherwise idled OS.
All the geek info about what process blew up where when is available in
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From TFA, the crash screen is a single image file, a screenshot. It's probably no harder to load a single screen than a stream of text. And OSX does have an option to display text error messages if you really want to see them.
Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... (Score:5, Informative)
But Amiga wasn't first. The Mac "Bomb" preceded it, and was notoriously useless for troubleshooting.
Still, most Windows XP users haven't seen a BSOD ever. Go ahead and ask them. See, Windows XP solved that. But mysteriously, their power supply is unreliable, and "trips" on the slightest whim.
You gotta love that. "BSOD is bad for marketing, and most people don't know what to do with the information anyway. Let's just reset the computer and pretend it's a power spike."
I'd advise people to change their default settings, but one time I had "write memory contents to log file on BSOD" enabled when I was moving data about, and hand less free memory on my HD than in RAM.
Don't ever, ever do that.
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Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... (Score:5, Funny)
Error: Type 11
"But I keep typing 11 and nothing's happening"
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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.
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Really? Could you describe in more detail?
I know old ATA was a crap standard, but I thought SATA had corrected many of ATA's problems, and copied a lot of the good stuff from SCSI (e.g., "NCQ" to allow reordering of requests).
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SATA is aimed for desktop systems. Almost no early SATA systems had NCQ, although more and more newer models have it now. It's been tacked on, not central to the design for decades like in SCSI.
Just take the baddest SATA drive around, the Western Digital Raptor 150. A 10,000 RPM drive with NCQ (Note, the earlier 36 GB and 74 GB Raptor SATA drives did n
Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... (Score:5, Informative)
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" [quickerwit.com] 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... (Score:5, Funny)
Ya, but at least on the PDP-11... (Score:2)
Apple perfected the 'Bomb' of death! (Score:2)
(And of course, today apple uses the "Spinning beachball of death" for app hangs
I'll see your Bomb and raise you a MacsBug (Score:2)
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
What happens if... (Score:3, Funny)
Sort of unrelated (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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I used to use that screensaver too. One time, my old roommate accidentally locked my computer. When BSOD came up, he thought it had crashed.
That's how I discovered he was looking at porn on my computer.
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At one company, I installed the BSOD screen saver on our NT file server because it amused me.
Of course, less than an hour later I nearly had a heart attack when I looked up from a big code check-in to see our file server had 'blue-screened'.
I uninstalled it soon afterwards :-)
Aside: I seem to remember that the NT 'bouncing lines' screen saver used to halve server performance when it kicked in (genius!), so in the end I went for the boring old 'make the screen go blank' screen saver.
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I used to have that screensaver going in X. I actually flipped out once because I got the kernel panic (wasn't thinking) and I was in the middle of something rather important and I just went on about "damn damn damn" in true Life of Brian fas
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Likewise (Score:4, Informative)
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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, w
Let me be the first to say (Score:4, Funny)
Any of you guys hiring?
Well on the upside (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is kinda lacking in the OSX Panic screen.
Re:Well on the upside (Score:4, Interesting)
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Windows XP does by default, but can be set not to (Control Panel, System, Advanced, Startup and Recovery).
A BSOD will also create a memory dump on disk (which can be set to either be a 'minidump', or a complete memory dump).
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Re:Well on the upside (Score:5, Funny)
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:Well on the upside (Score:5, Insightful)
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For end users, a bunch of hexadecimal won't mean squat. Telling them to reboot in a non-scary way is a Good Thing.
Re:Well on the upside (Score:5, Informative)
Review... TN2063 [apple.com], TN2118 [apple.com], Debugging the Kernel [apple.com], etc.
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The OS X panic details get logged to a file, so you can easily get this information in a nice digital form after you've rebooted (or by setting the system into target disk mode). Which, on the plus side, means you don't have to sit and scribble down a bunch of hex and hope that you got in all correct before typing into your system to e-mail to someone for diagnosis.
Lik
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Actually, it's possible on Windows as well. Not that I particularly *like* Windows by any stretch of the imagination, but XP and 2003, at least, will write a memory dump to the system swap file to be copied into %systemroot%\memory.dmp on the following startup, provided that it's configured to do so. The memory dump can then be loaded into a debugger to do post-mortem debugging. It does have a talent for not being the most useful on some configurations - I've run into issues on systems with >2G of memor
The world's funniest joke (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, couldn't this be described as the ultimate joke [youtube.com]?
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You must be new here.
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You must be new here.
Jokes are supposed to be original.
a good joke would consist of the following steps (Score:3, Funny)
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 obsc
Old Hat (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Chairing a Meeting (Score:4, Funny)
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.
I have only seen the Screen of Death on OS X only (Score:2)
Re:I have only seen the Screen of Death on OS X on (Score:2)
Re:I have only seen the Screen of Death on OS X on (Score:2)
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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
Re:I've seen two and one was oddly today (Score:3, Informative)
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 some
Leave it to apple! (Score:3, Funny)
This is taking things too far... (Score:3, Funny)
What about the Guru? (Score:2, Funny)
Hidden? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Stupid boring new crash screen... (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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I thought the old ones played "funeral chimes" when they crashed.
-b.
Gray screen of death (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Re:Gray screen of death (Score:4, Informative)
What you have experienced is the phenomenom of Mac OS X getting caught up in: "ups, the disk is full - so now I can't save any (system) preferences." Any files written during this will end up as zero-byte files.
There is no magic "QuickTime will overwrite vital systemfiles, to which only root has access"-routines.
Re:Gray screen of death (Score:4, Informative)
You're completely wrong. When the free space reaches 100%, write() will return ENOSPC (no space). The superuser will still be able to use the system, because traditionally, there's a 5% reserve which only uid=0 can use. (The "df" goes up to 105%.) The correct semantics are well-defined. If you've seen anything else, it's a bug in whatever system you were using, which no one could seriously defend.
Now, if you're talking about user applications breaking when encountering this condition...yeah, there are certainly some out there that break. There are buggy applications written for every platform. It's just laziness - Unix gives them well-defined semantics they can use to handle it correctly and an easy test environment (quotas).
Re:Gray screen of death (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not the point. A malicious user can hose the entire system by running 'cat /dev/zero >> /opt/junk'. And I mean hose as in "system unusable, 100% of data lost"; the worst kind of hosed. The fact that Final Cut has options to manage this doesn't detract from the fact that the OS should manage itself better. Writing over track 0 on the HD? Creation of undeletable files? What is this, a return to the 8-bit days again?
When you get to 100MB free, the OS should tell the applications to go away. It should never fill 100% of the drive. Let's see you boot to remedy it when you can't write to log files.
Ultimate joke.... (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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.
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BSOD (Score:2)
Maybe Linux needs to adopt this so as to ease the transition from MS Windows.
Oligatory Monty Python Reference (Score:4, Funny)
Another promise Microsoft didn't keep... (Score:3, Funny)
Old and Busted: BSOD. New: RSOD (Score:2, Interesting)
Red is so much scarier.
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/05/07/
Bah! You young punks! (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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-David
Redmond... (Score:4, Funny)
I've had... let's see... (Score:2, Interesting)
Big deal (Score:2)
Moo (Score:3)
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.
Yeah, funny like AFHV (Score:2)
Ah man, now THAT'S humor. If by humor, you mean stupid.
Becouse you all know... (Score:5, Funny)
And don't get me wrong, I'm typing this on a Mac and I would not trade it for anything else out there
Lol (Score:2)
Re:You want the ultimate joke? (Score:4, Funny)
Once we built a system for C*tibank (T+2) in FoxPro 2.6 for Windows and one of the users actually took a screenshot of the same, put it as background, and then complained our application doesn't work.
We spent 2 FULL days debugging the damn application before we realized the issue.
Oh.... &&%%$$&&