New Linux ‘Screen of Death’ Options: Black – or a Monochrome Tux Logo

New Linux ‘Screen of Death’ Options: Black – or a Monochrome Tux Logo

It was analgous to the “Blue Screen of Death” that Windows gives for critical errors, Phoronix wrote. To enable error messages for things like a kernel panic, Linux 6.10 introduced a new panic handler infrastructure for “Direct Rendering Manager” (or DRM) drivers.

Phoronix also published a follow-up from Red Hat engineer Javier Martinez Canillas (who was involved in the new DRM Panic infrastructure).

Given complaints about being too like Microsoft Windows following his recent Linux “Blue Screen of Death” showcase… Javier showed that a black screen of death is possible if so desired… After all, it’s all open-source and thus can customize to your heart’s content.

And now the panic handler is getting even more new features, Phoronix reported Friday:

With the code in Linux 6.10 when DRM Panic is triggered, an ASCII art version of Linux’s mascot, Tux the penguin, is rendered as part of the display. With Linux 6.11 it will also be able to handle displaying a monochrome image as the logo.
If ASCII art on error messages doesn’t satisfy your tastes in 2024+, the DRM Panic code will be able to support a monochrome graphical logo that leverages the Linux kernel’s boot-up logo support. The ASCII art penguin will still be used when no graphical logo is found or when the existing “LOGO” Kconfig option is disabled. (Those Tux logo assets being here.)

This monochrome logo support in the DRM Panic handler was sent out as part of this week’s drm-misc-next pull request ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window in July. This week’s drm-misc-next material also includes TTM memory management improvements, various fixes to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers, and also the previously talked about monochrome TV support for the Raspberry Pi.

Long-time Slashdot reader unixbhaskar thinks the new option “will certainly satisfy the modern people… But it is not as eye candy as people think… Moreover, it is monochrome, so certainly not resource-hungry. Plus, if all else fails, the ASCII art logo is still there to show!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.