Slashdot Log In
Blue Screen of Death for Mac OS X
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Sep 11, 2006 07:07 PM
from the creative-wastes-of-time dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
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)
Parent
Re:Keep it simple (Score:5, Funny)
You are so not a Mac owner based on these statements.
Parent
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
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... (Score:5, Funny)
Error: Type 11
"But I keep typing 11 and nothing's happening"
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Likewise (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Well on the upside (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well on the upside (Score:5, Informative)
Review... TN2063 [apple.com], TN2118 [apple.com], Debugging the Kernel [apple.com], etc.
Parent
The world's funniest joke (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, couldn't this be described as the ultimate joke [youtube.com]?
Hidden? (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
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?
Oligatory Monty Python Reference (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Redmond... (Score:4, Funny)
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
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.
Parent