Customize the kernel panic screen

Sep 13, '06 07:30:05AM

Contributed by: robg

Warning: I do not recommend trying any of the following. It seems like a Really Good Way to cause nothing but problems if you do something wrong. Nonetheless, it is quite interesting, if for nothing else than knowing it can be done. Proceed at your own risk.

I caught this on Slashdot yesterday ... it seems the kernel panic screens (as seen at right) in OS X are customizable, and Amit Singh provides the "how to" details in his book, Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach. It turns out that the bit on customizing the kernel panic screens is online, in a piece titled A New Screen of Death for Mac OS X.

In his write-up, Amit explains how to find the current screen and replace it with one of your own choosing. He even provides source code to test your screen (or the default screen), without actually causing a kernel panic. Note that doing all of this is not for the faint of heart -- you'll need to install and compile various pieces of source code, as well as modify (for Intel Macs) existing programs. This is all well beyond my skill set (though that didn't prevent me from trying to compile, unsuccessfully, the kernal panic test code), but I thought it interesting enough to share.

At the end of the article, Amit shows how to replace the OS X kernel panic screen with a copy of the Windows BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). Quite funny, and maybe someday I'll be brave enough to try it ... on a test system, of course!

As a side note, if you need the kernel panic image for anything, you can download it directly from Apple's Open Source pages. This one is from the 10.4.7 PowerPC branch (and you'll need an Apple Developer account to download it).

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