Adding Blue Screen of Death to Non-Windows OS

Question

I am looking to get into operating system kernel development and figured and have been reading books on operating systems (Tannenbaum) as well as studying how BSD and Linux have tackled this challenge but still am stuck on several concepts.

1. If I wanted to mimic the Windows Blue Screen of Death on an operating system, would I simply put this logic in the panic kernel method?

2. Are there ways to improve upon how Windows currently performs this functionality?

Answer 1

I'm not exactly sure where to look in the source but you might want to look into ReactOS, an open source Windows clone which has BSOD already.

Answer 2

1. You can emulate Windows's bugcheck functionality wherever you want. Most Linux systems put it in XScreenSaver.

   However, I doubt that this is what you're really asking about. Are you asking how to generate a dump file?

2. To improve Windows bugchecks, Windows driver developers can use KeRegisterBugCheckReasonCallback() to record more information about the state of their drivers in the generated minidump. This potentially may improve the effectiveness of post-mortem debugging when full kernel/memory dumps are not enabled.

Answer 3

BSDs actually handled this much better then Windows with DDB :)
Here's another link to FreeBSD Kernel Debugging docs.