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