Panic screens are an important part of any OS - they allow you to see not only that you've made a mistake, but often why and how. The panic screen in Windows is particularly infamous, and helpful to some subset of engineers, though not very shiny. OS X has a rather neat, but ultimately not very useful panic screen involving an embedded image in the kernel.

とあるOS has mostly had debug output like kernel panics written to a serial log. Since I'm usually working in the GUI and often have the logs completely disabled, it made sense to add a new panic format. To that end, I was inspired by a popular video game series, and made these new panic screens:

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desktop

OOM

The panic handler first outputs to the debug log (if set) and then calls out to the video driver to have it display a visual indicator of failure. The video driver can take an array of messages to display, which are usually sprintf'd into the kernel stack by the calling fault handler. With this particular setup, the video driver desaturates the dispaly to grayscale, adds a (crude) vignette effect, and then displas the fault message in the center of the screen using an embedded bitmap font.