Linux gets its own Windows-style Blue Screen of Death

Free operating system Linux is looking to Windows as its role model, at least in this one way: implementing its own Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) to warn users in cases of a kernel panic.

The BSOD—with the official name “DRM Panic”—will be included in the operating system for the first time with Linux 6.10, prompting users to reboot. Its usefulness will be further expanded in the near future.

The whole thing was solved by direct rendering manager drivers (DRM drivers) and kernel mode setting drivers (KMS drivers). In Linux 6.10, the new DRM panic handler will be integrated into the kernel for the first time. At launch, DRM & KMS drivers SimpleDRM, MGAG200, IMX, and AST are supported, with more to follow.

Nouveau-DRM panic patches are already in preparation, but will probably only be integrated in Linux 6.11 as they won’t be ready in time for Linux 6.10. Systemd already introduced a similar error screen as a BSOD for its version 255 in December 2023.

What the Linux blue screen looks like

Red Hat developer Javier Martinez Canillas showed a first screenshot of the BSOD for Linux on Mastodon. Lo and behold, the blue screen for Linux is far less cryptic than Microsoft’s famous BSOD.

You’ll see a fully blue screen with an ASCII art penguin in the top left corner. In the center of the screen is the text “Kernel Panic!” with a smaller statement below it, prompting the user to reboot the computer.

In the future, the error message will be named even more precisely and comprehensibly and supplemented with helpful details. It will also be possible to call up the error with a corresponding QR code.

You can test the BSOD for yourself

If you’re on a system running Linux 6.10 or higher—or another system that already supports “DRM Panic”—then you can manually test the new Linux BSOD with the following command:

echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger