The better way to BSOD
About two months ago, I wrote about how to make a Mac’s kernel panic look like a BSOD. Today I would like to make a correction.
Amit Singh sent me an email after my last post politely suggesting that I missed a solution to Blue Screen OS X. And indeed I did.
Shortly after he sent his email, Amit wrote a piece about an easier way to load a BSOD image into OS X’s kernel. No kernel swaps required. He also went into detail about the concepts and code behind the mysterious panic on OS X.
The only problem I see is that loading an image in at boot time, like Amit suggests, requires a reload upon reboot. But who I am I kidding, my way involved swapping out the entire kernel. I’m sure if a BSOD’ing mac is really necessary, a script can be made to load the image on each boot.
Just for kicks I am distributing the code for my app that actually triggers the panic, “Panic! At the Kernel”. You will notice the backend code is identical to Amit’s, because I originally got the idea from his book. However, my program does include a lovely cocoa GUI just to add more irony to this whole Mac OS X BSOD thing.
Thursday, September 14, 2006