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systemd 255 Released With A "Blue Screen of Death" For Linux Systems
https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-255
https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-255
I love this! Not only for the comedic value, but throwing kernel oopses on-screen when they can't be easily captured when unprepared would be of great help in solving system problems. Unlike the cryptic messages Windows displays, Linux kernel messages are quite useful.
Isn't this the default behavior of all(?) modern *nix init? Maybe not SysV, i don't know.
Is it? I've been on Debian/Ubuntu since 2005 and I've never seen anything on-screen whenever I've gotten a kernel oops.
Some Highlights:
A new component "systemd-bsod" has been added to show logged error messages full-screen if they have a "LOG_EMERG" log level. This is intended as a tool for displaying emergency log messages full-screen on boot failures. Yes, BSOD in this case short for "Blue Screen of Death". This was worked on as part of Outreachy 2023. The systemd-bsod will also display a QR code for getting more information on the error causing the boot failure.
Hibernation into swap files backed by Btrfs are now supported.
Support for split-usr has been removed.
Actually looking forward to the btrfs swapfile hibernation; I have tried setting it up on my machine before but the documentation was never clear on whether it would work (or why mine wasn't).
i totally understand if they named it bsod just for the meme, it's funny also they could make an option to change de color :b
The thought of someone's Linux install failing catastrophically, displaying a "MSoS", then the user switching back to the is MS OS because of it is funny to me.
Back about two decades when I was using Windows and it was till easily customisable, I changed the bsod colour to red for funsies. Windows being Windows crashed and went to my red screen of death - my ex's cousin saw it and thought it was something really really bad, "Wow, a red screen, never seen that before. Must be even worse than blue". No mate, I just customise the shit out of anything I touch 😅
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this basically just better error reporting? It's not like it's gonna crash more often, it will just actually show log info if something catastrophic happens.
Unfortunately this only affects boot messages, not normal system operation, for that you still get core dumps and kernel panics / oops
that's the goal, they also gonna implement the QR code, but not like the crappy of QR code on windows(that send you to a suppirt page with a dozen of possible sulution, where nothing work), the qr code is going translate to the kernel panic message, i liked, i can scan the qr code and search the error on my cell
I just wish they would use another name for it, it's linux here no need to copy windows slang! Or use another color! (I hope they'll update it to make it a customizable color)
Fun fact: The Windows BSOD colour was as easy as adding a couple of lines to a .INI file for a long time. Then, as they tend to do, they made it more difficult, but it was still possible. Third party tools were written to do the work.
Very recent MS Windows I have no idea about. My search-fu is failing me.
Anyway, my point is that the "two lines in a config file" method would be nice.
Knowing systemd though, it'll be "send some kind of message into a /proc pseudo-file", or a sub-sub-sub-command of one of the many systemd* commands which ultimately does the same thing.
Yeah, Linux should have taken the guru meditation from the Amiga! (I know VirtualBox already copied it mind you)
PSoD
Piss Screen of Death?
edit: oh nvm, I mistakenly thought this was in reply to the suggestion for dark yellow.
I hope this isn't going to be the default. I know, the average granny might prefer to have a BSOD with a QR code, but I think a lot of the people who are more tech-savvy, like me, would prefer to see log messages when booting because then you could see which service failed and why or why it's all of a sudden taking so long to boot. That's also why I choose not to have a splash screen when booting.
Anyways, this BSOD thing doesn't apply to me because I use Gentoo with OpenRC.
Hibernation into swap files backed by Btrfs are now supported.
So, with btrfs on ssd, is there any use case for a swap partition?
I think what they mean is that you can just make a swap FILE instead, which you can grow and shrink as needed. No need to mess with partitioning.
Yep. In fact my comment seemed so clear to me that I assumed it was some kind of joke, but looking at the votes, maybe swapfiles aren't as well known as I thought.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory
What would you describe it as? With virtual memory it pretty much functions that way, no?
I'm not sure what that post is meant to show, if swap isn't "disk RAM". That post even concludes:
Swap [...] provides another, slower source of memory [...]
Um, you really need to read the entire phrase and not pick out only what you want from it. 😃
Swap can make a system slower to OOM kill, since it provides another, slower source of memory to thrash on in out of memory situations
It means that if you try to use it as a source of memory, when you run out of actual RAM it will make your system almost completely unresponsive due to disk thrash, instead of allowing the kernel to just kill the process that's eating your RAM. So you'll just end up hard-booting system.
Yes, and that's a good thing if you don't want it to start killing processes. You have that extra time/space to deal with the out-of-memory condition yourself.
Or you can ignore that condition and continue using the system in a degraded state, with swap as "disk RAM".
Do you mean that you don't have to find the LBA of the extents of your swap file, and put that into a kernel argument anymore?
Cuz that is a nasty, skanky hack.
I've never heard of that, it's beyond me. So it's an increased risk when tweaking the kernel? As an average home user it's all right?
I don't think it's going to do a whole lot of good when the whole KMS/DRM falls over.
(okay I haven't had that for a few months now. But i am still traumatized)
Good idea, stupid name.
Excellent for causing FUD.
No, this will not increase the amount of kernel panics you see. It just makes them more informational to the average person. Technical folks can disable it, non-technical folks won't know how to enable it, so on by default it is.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ahead of the holidays systemd 255 has debuted as stable and comes with systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" service capable of displaying full-screen error messages on Linux.
This is intended as a tool for displaying emergency log messages full-screen on boot failures.
The systemd-bsod will also display a QR code for getting more information on the error causing the boot failure.
Systemd's bootctl will now show whether the system was booted from a Unified Kernel Image (UKI).
systemctl will now automatically soft-reboot into a new root file-system if found under /run/nextroot/ when a reboot operation is invoked.
A new option "SurveFinalKillSignal" has been added to skip the final SIGTERM/SIGKILL spree on shutdown in order to survive soft-reboot operation.
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