Linux's New DRM Panic "Blue Screen of Death" In Action
Linux's New DRM Panic "Blue Screen of Death" In Action
It is not informative yet, but I like that it's blue. It's a quite recognizable color. Windows made it recognizable by having a lot of BSODs. People are asking why it couldn't be just black, but with non-black BSOD one can recognize it instantly without reading the text.
82Just for reference, a few years back, (ex-Microsoft) David Plummer had this historical dive into the (MIPS) origin of the blue color, and how Windows is not blue anymore: https://youtu.be/KgqJJECQQH0?t=780
36Oh, thanks! I don't know much about the current state of Windows.
6Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/KgqJJECQQH0?t=780
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
2Hey @Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works the last chapter of this video is called redscreen, are you David Plummer? lol
2
Reminds me of my Windows XP days when I used to customise the hell out of everything I could... custom boot screen... and yes custom BSOD. Which I switched to red 🟥❗ One day my PC RSODs in front of a family member and he said, "Oh shit, that must be really bad if it's red instead of blue!" 😂
76VMware went with Purple for their hypervisors so you get a PSOD instead. Always was fun when you’d hit the console for a server and get greeted by that instead of the yellow and black split screen.
20Ahh, that sweet yellow and black split screen 😌
3
A QR code created from the actual fault text would be super helpful. That way we can scan it and get the full error message (details and all) on another device without having to snap a picture or something. But not like windows does it, where it's a link to a defunct page. I'm taking about the actual text transcoded into a QR code.
57I believe the main contributor for drm_panic wants to add one eventually. Here's what it might look like:
https://gitlab.com/kdj0c/panic_report/-/issues/1Also it looks like the colours are configurable at compile time (with white on black default).
34Ah man, I was hoping I'd be rickrolled
8This looks EXACTLY as I imagined!
4
And windows shows it for a few seconds, never enough time to pick the phone.
11
What's DRM in this context? Surely linux kernel doesn't do digital rights management?
50Direct Rendering Manager. Part of Linux kernel to communicate with GPUs.
79Direct Rendering Manager
44DRM came before DRM
28Doesn't matter; I still get triggered by it every time anyway.
4
It ought to be mandatory to write this out whenever talking about Linux. I've seen more than one person bash Linux in a public forum "because it has digital rights management built into the kernel" after they've misinterpreted some news headline.
11AIUI, the "Direct Rendering Manager" is responsible for the display change when you press ctrl-alt-Fn#. Once upon a time, Xfree86 or svgalib would directly poke registers in the video card. If a program crashed with the video card in a weird state, you're pretty much stuck with that until you do a blind reboot. The kernel had very little idea about what was going on with the video card.
Under DRM, the kernel now knows about the video card's state. The kernel handles resolution or dotclocks or whatever, and hands out mmaps of framebuffers and command buffers to programs. I think. The kernel is supposed to gatekeep any commands that may put the display into a deranged, all-you-can-do-now-is-power-it-down state.
1
Of all the things to take from windows, this is one of the better ones. Especially if it gets more info in the future. For less tech-literate users, a screen like this is a lot better than a hard to read dump to a terminal.
46The kernel art department really failed us here. Instead of a blue screen of death we could've had, I don't know, literally any other colour. I'd have gone with the Puce Screen of Panic.
28How about black on white with a clear stack trace visible
23That would be far too helpful.
1
Puce Screen of Panic
That's class
12Guru Meditation red.
Alternately: yellow-and-black ASCII approximating Evangelion's ALART.
11
It needs more information about what went wrong. That's about as useful as a windows BSOD.
25I thought for a minute that Linux now panics when trying to play DRM'd content
7Did they have to go with such a loud shade of blue? It would look so much better on the eyes if it was a nice deep dark blue.
Tbh I don't even know why it needs to be blue or any colour at all.
7Everyone knows what the blue screen is. This makes the implication when the screen does appear really obvious.
No need to reinvent the wheel.
5Agree, the old windows blue screen would sear your retinas, could definitely be tuned down a bit.
3Exactly
Black with big white text would be nice
1
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After being talked about for years of DRM panic handling and coming with a "Blue Screen of Death" solution for DRM/KMS drivers, Linux 6.10 is introducing a new DRM panic handler infrastructure for being able to display a message when a panic occurs.
With Linux 6.10 the initial DRM Panic code has landed as well as wiring up the DRM/KMS driver support for the SimpleDRM, MGAG200, IMX, and AST drivers.
For those curious what DRM Panic can look like in action, Red Hat engineer Javier Martinez Canillas shared a photo of the DRM Panic "Blue Screen of Death" in action.
A BeaglePlay single board computer was used and Javier posted to Mastodon of an example implementation:
It could be extended in the future with some operating systems having looked at QR codes for kernel error messages and other efforts for presenting more technical information while still being user-friendly.
On Linux 6.10+ with platforms having the DRM Panic driver support, this "Blue Screen of Death" functionality can be tested via a route such as echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger.
The original article contains 231 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 23%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
6Also see: systemd-bsod. Generates QR codes, too. I think blue for userspace boot-time errors and black for kernel stuff might be nice.
6It's beautiful. I assume they'll dump the kernel oops log if there's any.
3Once again, Linux is late with a feature that Microsoft not only has had for years, but is famous for.
-13Windows is famous in all the wrong ways
22Not sure if you're coming or simping M$
13It's normal for things to implement stuff from each other? 🤷
Microsoft is late with many things too. And I don't nessesarly think a feature here and there is what makes a good OS, the base stuff is more important.
3