Images of Mortal Malady: Ranging from Diagnostic Aids to a Lonely Emoticon
In the lifespan of any operating system, there'll come a time when an unfortunate event will abruptly end its uptime. It could be due to a badly written driver, a system bug, or plain bad luck. The OS's kernel, in its final moments, tries to salvage the situation by gathering diagnostic information and displaying a supportive message to the user screen. This screen of despair is known by many names – from a kernel panic message on Linux to a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on Windows since Windows 95, and a more contemplative message on AmigaOS and BeOS/Haiku.
As time passes, these Screens of Death (SoD) have evolved significantly – from the highly informative screens of Windows NT to the now simplified BSOD of Windows 8, featuring a prominent sad emoji that has garnered a fair amount of ridicule. It seems that the Windows BSOD is about to metamorphose again, potentially losing its iconic blue hue. But what's the big deal about these changes? What were these special screens supposed to deliver us?
A Moment to Collect Thoughts
Regardless of the color, the most crucial piece of information provided by these SoDs is what the user gets when things go south – before taking a deep sigh and hitting the reset button, followed by staring dejectedly at the boot screen. After regaining access to the OS, one can delve into the system logs for hints, but some details will only be displayed on the screen when dealing with storage drive issues, for example.
The structure and arrangement of this information on these SoDs vary from operating system to operating system and over time. The Guru Meditation screen of AmigaOS, infamous for its inside joke origin, is quite well-known. Interestingly, both Windows 9x and ME, as well as AmigaOS, had fatal as well as non-fatal special screens. In the case of AmigaOS, you'd receive a similar screen to the Guru Meditation screen, displaying an error code, but suggesting a possibility of continuing operation after confirming the message.
For Windows 9x/ME users, this may ring a bell as well: In this series of OSes, you'd get these screens, with mashing a key returning you to a somewhat miffed but generally still functioning OS, minus the misbehaving application or driver. It could certainly happen that you'd find yourself in an endless loop of these screens until giving up and executing the three-finger salute to put Windows out of its misery. An intriguing design choice, which Microsoft's Raymond Chen readily admits, was somewhat quaint. What it did was to abandon the current event and return to the event dispatcher to give things another shot.
A characteristic of these BSODs in Windows 9x/ME was that they didn't provide a large amount of information about the reason for the brutal interruption. On the Apple side of the fence, things were not much more elaborate, with OS X's kernel panic message being plastered over with a 'Nothing to see here, please restart' message, a practice that has been consistent since the Sad Mac days of Apple.
This starkly contrasts with the world of Windows NT, where even the already trimmed BSOD of Windows XP is on par with the business-focused Windows 2000 in terms of information. Notably, a BSOD on Windows NT-based operating systems is a true 'Screen of Death', from which you absolutely will not return.
These BSODs provide valuable information, including the faulting module, the fault type, and some hexadecimal values that can potentially help with narrowing down the fault. Compared to the extensive information overload in Windows NT 3.1, with a partial on-screen memory dump, the level of detail provided by Windows 2000 through Windows 7 is probably sufficient for the average user to start troubleshooting.
It's intriguing that more recent versions of Windows have opted to restart automatically when a BSOD occurs, making the displayed information irrelevant in most cases. This was the reasoning behind Windows 8's simplification, replacing the detailed information with a generic 'collecting information' progress counter before restarting.
The Dawn of a New Era
Although nobody was complaining about the style of BSODs in Windows 7, somehow Windows 8 ended up with a massive sad emoji plastered on the top half of the screen and no hexadecimal values. Windows 10 added a big QR code that directs to troubleshooting instructions. This overly friendly and non-technical BSOD bewildered and annoyed the tech community, prompting cruel mockery.
In this context, it's interesting to see these latest BSOD screen mockups from Microsoft, which will allegedly make their way to Windows 11 soon. These new BSOD screens appear to have a black background (perhaps a 'Black Screen of Death'?), omit the sad emoji, and offer only minimal text:
What's striking here is the small size of the stop code at the bottom of the screen, with the faulting module below it in an even smaller font. This represents a significant departure from the BSOD formats up until Windows 7, where such information was plainly printed on the screen, along with additional information that anyone could copy over to paper or snap a picture of for a quick analysis.
So, Why?
The question remains whether Microsoft expects users to use these SoDs for informative purposes or whether they'd prefer them to forget these errors, considering them something shameful that users should not concern themselves with. Maybe they hope that diagnostics will be left to paid professionals, who would have to delve into the memory dumps, the system logs, and further information.
Whatever the case, it seems that the era of blue SoDs is over now in Windows, and any embellishments, general advice, and more in-depth debug information have vanished. This means that distinguishing the different causes behind a specific stop code, contained in the hexadecimal numbers, can only be gleaned from the system log entry in Event Viewer, provided it was recorded, and you're not dealing with a boot partition or similar fundamental issue.
Because these events are relatively rare, it is crucial that these screens are as descriptive as possible, offering clear guidance to users. Sadly, mainstream desktop OSes like Linux and BSD don't seem to prioritize this aspect either, making it challenging for users to figure out the origin of a kernel panic without delving into the Systemd tool or its equivalent.
This is where the SoD generated upon a fiery kernel explosion sets the tone for the user's reaction.
The first sentence could be: "In the realm of Linux, the Screen of Death (SoD) presents a message of calm persistence, informing users about the unfortunate event that led to the system's shutdown, and potentially providing some insightful technical details to aid in troubleshooting."
The second sentence, based on the context provided, could be: "Unlike Windows and its evolving designs, the Linux SoD remains consistent, offering a bare-bones approach, eschewing aesthetics for the delivery of essential data-and-cloud-computing and technology-related information in a hardware-agnostic manner, thereby emphasizing its commitment to open-source philosophy and usability."
